Reading Ramona the Brave To My 6-Year-Old Reminded Me How Confusing Childhood Can Be

"Everyone in the room except Howie laughed. Ramona was startled, then embarrassed."

As I read the line from Ramona the Brave aloud to my 6-year-old, unraveling the story of a first grader on the first day of school quickly descending from excitement to embarrassment to rage to subdued quiet, I was reminded how confusing childhood can be. How easily you can be misunderstood by your peers and your teachers. I remembered that childhood version of myself in the character of Ramona, and I saw her in my youngest.

After winter break, my youngest, then a kindergartener, begged to stay home just one day to study Arabic. We'd enrolled her in a language immersion school that fall, a public magnet school with this unique learning opportunity — a decision made by us, for her. She'd adapted, as children do, but this transition after the holiday was rough.

To our adult brains, staying home was a fruitless endeavor. Our non-Arabic-speaking household could offer nothing, and she was better off at school, immersed in the language. We sent her to school, but I appreciated her request. She wanted to take a beat and regroup. We approached it from our grown-up outlook, with its sometimes faulty logic and chaotic schedule, where expectations trump personal interest, where there is no time to take your time.

Beverly Cleary flips the script, centering the world of Ramona and, occasionally, her sister Beezus. The stories are nothing epic. Home renovations and making paper-bag owls and sibling rivalry. Of course, that is the stuff of childhood.

When my oldest was still a toddler, I had a sudden epiphany while on our daily meandering walk to the park. She is her own person, with her own life. It turned my perspective upside down — instead of seeing my life as folding around her world, I saw us as two people doing life in tandem, both occasionally inconvenienced by the other's demands. I feel like I forgot that with my youngest, getting caught up in the harried life of a parent of two, navigating a pandemic, and losing my patience more often than not.

Reading Ramona reminded me of this lesson once again. More than half a century before gentle parenting came in vogue, the Ramona series reminds us what it is like to navigate imagination while bored in class or to be chastised for trying to help a classmate. "Keep your eyes on your own work," the teacher scolds Ramona, who is simply concerned about a fellow classmate falling behind. Some stories almost directly mirror experiences my kids, or even myself, have had.

In first grade, I felt the knowing creep of nausea during lunch. It was pizza day. I hadn't touched the precious rectangle of cheese. I quietly raised my hand, waiting, as I was told, for the lunch monitor to acknowledge me and give me permission to get up from my seat. I waited and waited and waited. Eventually, I vomited on my tray, with my hand still unwaveringly raised in the air. "Ew!" "Gross!" The chorus of disgust from my tablemates was swift.

I got up to tell the lunch monitor, a towering woman with a stern glare. She immediately yelled, "You aren't supposed to get up without raising your hand!"

I timidly explained my predicament, and she dragged me at arm's length down to the nurse.

In Ramona Quimby, Age 8, Ramona also vomits in front of her classmates. It's comforting to read the fictionalized version and then share this story of my own childhood with my kids. To watch their eyes get big in knowing horror. It's comforting for my daughters to read about sisters bickering or parents fighting over who should have plugged in the Crock-Pot. It's validating seeing your experiences normalized — to see someone, not unlike yourself, get through them.

As we cuddle in the evenings before bedtime, reading through each chapter of the Ramona Quimby series, watching Ramona grow from a 4-year-old to a second-grader, I soften to my daughter's reality. To the intricate inner life of my kids. To the reminder that we're both navigating big and complicated emotions in a big and complicated world.