When I was ten years old, what most appealed to me as I followed the adventures of Mary, Colin, and Dickon were the cool ideas of the children running free with little adult supervision, their pact of secrecy, and the element of magic. But now, several decades later and in a new chapter of life, I entered The Secret Garden as a mother, making connections and gleaning insight into raising my now-three-year-old daughter Grace.

The character that led my way back into the garden is Mrs. Sowerby, the mother of Dickon and Martha, two of Mary’s companions. While most of the novel is set at sprawling Misselthwaite Manor where Mary and her cousin Colin live, Susan Sowerby lives with her twelve children in a modest cottage far across the moors. Though she enters the secret garden only once, her motherly maxims are sprinkled throughout the novel. From her own experience, “the two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way — or always to have it.” Martha, Mary’s maidservant and eventual friend, invokes her mother’s often-used saying in reference to Colin, who stays in bed convalescing from a largely imagined illness and barking orders all day. Everyone obeys him for fear of his infamous tantrums; as a result, he becomes a miserable, self-centered boy. Martha is also referring to Mary who, when living a privileged life in India, was “quite contrary” and had everything done for her. As a result she arrives at the manor frail, pale, and poorly equipped to perform even the simplest tasks, such as dressing herself.

Mrs. Sowerby’s wisdom is evergreen; she has been a champion of children and a mentor to parents for over one hundred years. Though her aphorism had little impact on me before becoming the mother of a preschooler — let alone when I was ten — the second part of it has been at the forefront of my mind in raising Grace; as the parenting guides suggest, I strive not to indulge her every whim. But the first part of Mrs. Sowerby’s statement about the dangers of never letting a child have his own way also rings true. Shortly after turning two, Grace started boldly asserting her independence, generally when we needed to leave the house on time. She was determined to do everything herself: fasten her clothes, pour the maple syrup, climb into her car seat, and other things that created stressful departures. Through necessity I started adding extra time to let her practice zipping, pouring, and clicking. But I soon realized that the benefit of letting her have her own way extended far beyond making my life easier. Her self-esteem improved, and her contrariness waned as she honed new skills and learned to express herself.

Another bit of parenting wisdom I culled from The Secret Garden was through a striking quote by the narrator explaining that two opposing elements cannot coexist: “Two things cannot be in one place. ‘Where, you tend a rose, my lad, / A thistle cannot grow.’” Burnett refers to both Colin and Mary in this commentary. Colin believes he’s too weak to walk, so he doesn’t even try to get out of bed. Mary is told she is contrary and selfish, and so she is. Both children discover on their own that these things are untrue, and in the realm of the secret garden they come alive. I can’t help but think how much sooner both Mary and Colin would have blossomed if someone had planted the seed in their minds that, instead of being thistles, they were destined to be healthy, wonderful roses.

I’m quite sure that when I was ten, the metaphor of roses and thistles meant little to me. But as a mother, the passage resonated quite loudly in helping Grace through her tumultuous threes. When a child starts exerting her independence and throwing tantrums, the “constant and specific praise” technique often touted in parenting books to encourage young toddlers in their strides toward walking and talking becomes more challenging to follow. But as hard as it can be, I’m trying to say only positive things about Grace’s actions, to cultivate her as a rose, as Burnett suggests, so that there is no room for a thistle.

The most important — and useful — lesson I’ve taken away from my recent rereading of The Secret Garden is that a lifelong friendship with books begins with storytelling. When Colin is convalescing, Mary tells him vivid tales of the garden in hopes of drawing him out of his bed: “Things are crowding up out of the earth,” she tells him, “and there are flowers uncurling and buds on everything and the green veil has covered nearly all the gray.” These stories stimulate his imagination until Colin is propelled to get out of bed and read about flowers and birds, a precursor to venturing outside.

Whenever I’ve thought about The Secret Garden over the years, I’ve recalled this image with much affection. I love to picture Colin and Mary curled up on the velvet couch having tea and biscuits, reading for hours on end. I couldn’t wait to read to my own child (and eventually have her read aloud to me). Grace didn’t start speaking until she was almost two years old, but my husband and I kept talking to her and telling her stories constantly. When we read to her, we used theatrics and dramatic pauses to get her to join in: “a comb and a brush and a bowl full of…” For the longest time, Grace would sit on our laps, touching the pages of board books, silent. I wondered if I would ever hear her voice.

One day, when Grace was almost two and a half years old, I was folding clothes near her bedroom. I heard the words “…tree, Shel Stein.” I walked into her room and saw her, with her back turned to me, a familiar green book propped up on the rocking chair. I listened in awe as she “read” The Giving Tree aloud. I heard her voice rise and fall in the same manner as ours; I heard the excited pause in her voice at every page turn. Grace had been reading all along; we just couldn’t hear what was going on in her mind until she found her voice.

As an English teacher, I was always glad that Burnett chose storytelling and reading as the forces that got Colin out of his bed and into the garden. In reading The Secret Garden as a mother, I realized that storytelling and reading had produced a similar magic in our house.

As a teacher, one strategy I used for getting students to reread a novel was to tell them to equate reading a book with visiting a museum. Then I’d invoke the teenage literary icon Holden Caulfield to help me make my point. In The Catcher in the Rye, I’d tell them, Holden never tires of going to the Museum of Natural History. Even though nothing in the museum ever changes, it’s a different place every time he enters because he is different. Perhaps he’d just seen a beautiful gasoline rainbow in the street or overheard his parents arguing that morning. With each layer of experience, the museum is a new place because he is a new person.

The Secret Garden was a new and wonderful place when I entered it as a mother, just as it was when I was ten years old. Colin and Mary have lived with me for as long as I can recall, and I’m thrilled that I could see so much of my current life reflected in their adventures. From this experience of revisiting a classic, I’m looking forward to seeing what parenting wisdom I can cull from Charlotte, Scout, Jo, and all my other childhood literary friends.

 From the September/October 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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I have never liked the lists of “boy books” and “girl books” that appear in libraries, parenting magazines, educational handouts, and even make up whole books themselves. There always seems to be a note included that the choices can be enjoyed by both genders, and yet there continue to be separate lists. As a feminist, it drives me crazy that we are still talking this way, but it is more than that. The separation doesn’t make sense to me because it does not match my experiences reading books with boys and girls.

I have been reading aloud to kids and discussing their reading in book groups, as well as reading with my sons, for the past fifteen years. I have yet to have a child tell me they disliked a book we have read because they thought it was either “for girls” or “for boys.” The secret is that it simply has to be a good book.

It is sad to think that girls who read the Laura Ingalls Wilder series and the books of Louisa May Alcott would miss out on reading Treasure Island or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Or vice versa.

When my boys were very young, I never gave the gender of characters a second thought. I just read as many wonderful stories as possible to them. I noticed that picture books had far more male characters than female. It doesn’t get more fun than Dr. Seuss, but there are few admirable heroines in his stories. I did not, however, notice my two sons caring whether the lead character was a male or female person, or for that matter, as was often the case, a male or female animal. Do we hold the animals in E. B. White’s books or those of Robert Lawson to rigid gender stereotypes? Do children think about the fact that Charlotte is a girl who is the truest friend to Wilbur, a boy? I don’t think that is their focus.

As my sons grew and we read more chapter books, the gender of the characters continued to make no difference. They loved the silly Pippi Longstocking and the fierce Ramona as much as they did little Sam Krupnik in Lois Lowry’s series. As a result, they had the opportunity to laugh at and admire kids not all that different from themselves. I remember the special joy they experienced when, as second graders, they could be hysterical about the antics of a preschooler. It was such fun to see them looking back at their past. And it made no difference if it was a boy or a girl; it just had to be funny. I don’t think kids care if the main characters in the Roald Dahl books are male or female; they eagerly jump from Charlie and James to Matilda and Sophie. The kids I know insist on reading them all.

In many of the early children’s classics we read, such as those of E. Nesbit, it is a group of children, both male and female, who have the major roles and adventures. C. S. Lewis sends two girls and two boys into the wardrobe to Narnia. Does anyone ask this gender question about Harry, Ron, and Hermione?

There are so many books I want to share with my sons that no matter how much reading we do (and we do a lot), I have lists in my head that we will never be able to complete together. That is what got me started on our read-aloud summer of “‘Girl’ Books I Didn’t Want My Boys to Miss.” We started with The Secret Garden, which really shouldn’t be considered a girls’ book because two of the three main characters are boys. It is a book, however, about feelings. Not only did my sons love it, but my husband didn’t want me to begin the reading until he was home. So I decided to see how far I could push this idea of mine. If you are setting up a girls’ book category, nothing fits better than A Little Princess. Well, all I can say is that my three male listeners were as enamored of it as they were of the others by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The fact is they were responding to the beautiful writing and not to the gender of the characters (in an all-girls school). Could I go still further? Yes, even my much-loved Fossil sisters in Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (and then Theater Shoes) were a hit in my house—though it was not the ballet but the portrayal of theater in England to which my family was drawn.

As we began reading aloud Little House in the Big Woods, I found myself stunned that this was considered a girls’ book. Laura and Mary may be the heroines, but if you want to stick to stereotypes, has anyone noticed how much of this book is about the technical construction of homes and barns and icehouses or how many pages are devoted to guns and hunting and defending oneself? (What we noticed most about the book in the series about Almanzo’s childhood, Farmer Boy, was all the food!)

We also read Heidi and began seriously planning a family vacation in the Swiss Alps, which exceeded all our dreams when we were able to make it happen more than three years later. (My son ran through the fields of flowers, announcing he had made it to “Heidiland!”) In any case, this summer reading series continued a good deal past the summer and answered both my questions and my prayers.

Some might argue that the men in my family are in the minority and that the children in book groups are not a random sample, and that all may be true. But I have spent a lot of time considering the powerful negative impacts of generalizations. There is no need to reinforce the ideas of differences between the sexes. Those ideas are still widespread and deeply engrained in our culture. There are, however, serious reasons to protect those in the minority and serious dangers in encouraging people, particularly children, to believe that they belong to a somehow “deviant” group.

Our children—both boys and girls—lose when we constrain their reading preferences. Ironically, what is acceptable in books for girls today is a much wider range of characters and themes, thanks to the advances of feminism, while what is acceptable for boys is still sadly influenced by what I assume is homophobia and an intolerance of effeminacy. A girl reading Homer Price, Sherlock Holmes, or anything by Robert Louis Stevenson or Mark Twain would be viewed as a reader of classics, but a boy reading much of Louisa May Alcott, the Brontës, or Jane Austen would have a harder time with his image. Girls, at the same time, are harmed by believing boys cannot be interested in female heroines and authors.

Of course, some boys may want to read books about boys and some girls, books about girls. I would hope, though, that we could let those choices be truly free. Let’s stop dividing into blue and pink pages. Let’s protect every person’s right to read what they love.

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When my oldest child, Rory, was a toddler, I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him about Santa. “You wouldn’t rob him of that!” my mother scolded. Rob him of what, I thought, but I knew she meant the wonder of it all, the belief that a magical, benevolent being would grant your wishes. In the end I caved and told Rory the big merry lie; he ate it up like so much gingerbread.

My childhood self scoffed at the idea of flying reindeer, but my son gloried in the magic of beasts that could fly without wings. As a girl I’d noted that even if Santa were to come down our chimney, it was blocked by a woodstove; Rory didn’t care that we had no chimney and said Santa would probably come in through the heating vents. I was charmed by his imaginative openness and fed into it, even as I felt a twinge of guilt about lying to my kid. “It’s not lying,” my mother insisted. “It’s about including him in the story.”

Picture books played a big part in perpetuating the Santa myth in Rory’s life, and we soon amassed a broad library of stories to indulge his fascination. After just a few listens, he flawlessly imitated the British accent of the readers of our audiobook version of Bruce Whatley’s The Night Before Christmas, and he was baffled by the ending of The Polar Express. “Why can’t his sister hear the bell anymore?” he demanded. “She stopped believing in Santa Claus,” I told him, “but the boy kept believing.” “Me too,” said Rory emphatically. “I will always believe.”

Rory made good on this promise well into elementary school. He doggedly resisted peer pressure until one autumnal night. “Mom-Mom, is Santa real or do you and Mama put the presents under the tree?” It was the moment I’d dreaded. “Why do you ask?” I dodged carefully. “The other kids say I’m a loser for believing still. Just tell me the truth. I can handle it.” I took a deep breath. “OK, Rory, Mama and I do put the presents under the tree, but Santa — ” “All of them?” he interrupted and burst into tears. No, not tears — heaving, racking sobs. I tried to channel some inner “yes, Virginia” muse and explained that it’s the spirit of Santa that we hold onto, the joy of giving, the celebration of childhood…but Rory would have none of it. He whispered, “It’s like I know the words to the song, but the tune has slipped away.” A knife to the heart, I tell you! But then he said, “We can’t tell Emilia. She still believes.”

Yes, two-year-old Emilia did believe in Santa, since we had to include her in the story that her brother had loved so well. However, she did not adore Santa; she was terrified of him. Just a month or so earlier, Emilia’s toddlerhood fascination with babies had led to an attendant love of trains when I read her New Baby Train, Marla Frazee’s picture book version of the Woody Guthrie song. She firmly associated babies and trains from then on, doggedly looking for infants in any book about a little engine; this included The Polar Express. Seeing no babies, Emilia fixated on the jolly old elf — and was struck with horror.

It took me a while to figure out why Emilia was suddenly refusing to go to bed. Finally, after much prompting, she explained, “If I go to sleep Santa will come and Santa is scary!” Emilia had no sense of the passage of time, so telling her that “in a few weeks” Santa would come to her house meant that he could come any minute. She was, after all, the same child who was frightened by masks, clowns, and the potato mascot who ran around our town fair each fall lauding the benefits of fruits and vegetables. It made perfect sense that she would be terrified at the prospect of a big, bearded man prowling around while everyone was asleep. I told her that Santa would leave presents in the garage that year and staged a phone call to the North Pole to tell him not to enter our house.

When, in the space of one year, baby Caroline (now five), Natayja (now thirteen), and Stevie (now six) joined our family, we half-heartedly went along perpetuating the myth, with the thought that if Natayja and Stevie had any belief in Santa, it wouldn’t be fair to say, “Guess what? In our family he doesn’t exist. Happy adoption day!” And, just a few days after Natayja, nearly eight, came home to our family, I curled up on the couch with her to read Christmas books. “Which one do you want me to read?” I asked. “That one,” she said, pointing to Trina Schart Hyman’s illustrated edition of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. I wasn’t sure she’d have the attention span for the long text, but I started reading, “One Christmas was so much like another…” and we read the book straight through. This longer story allowed Natayja the uninterrupted time she needed to let her body sink into closeness with mine. Just as the mistletoe hanging in our dining room gave her an excuse to open herself up to kisses, shared reading of this book afforded her the time and space to cuddle. It didn’t matter how much she understood of the metaphor-rich language, or that Thomas’s Christmas memories were completely different from her own, or that in her experience of moving from family to family, one Christmas was so unlike another. What mattered was the sound of my voice reading to her, the images before her eyes as she pointed to them and said: “Look. It’s snowing,” or “Firefighters,” or “What’s that?”

When we reached the end she asked, “Can we read another one?” It was the first time she’d asked me for anything. We read for more than two hours on that couch, moving from eccentric aunts and candy cigarettes to a train traveling to the North Pole, and yes, to flying reindeer and good old Santa Claus. She delighted in these stories and later in visiting Santa at a local park, where she shyly told him what she wanted him to bring for her and her brothers and sisters and her two new moms.

I’m not sure when or how Natayja discovered that Santa is a story rather than a real person. She’s an ideal big sister, protective and kind, and she has played along every year for the benefit of her younger siblings. Stevie still believes in Santa Claus, but he can’t hold a Christmas candle to Caroline’s devotion, which seems to have surpassed even Rory’s belief. Caroline wants to read Christmas books all year long, and I indulge her in this, particularly in her favorite one, another Marla Frazee title, Santa Claus: The World’s Number One Toy Expert. “I just love his little underwears!” she says mischievously every time we read it and she beholds Santa romping around in his crazy Frazee boxers. But it’s not just Santa’s fashion sense that appeals to her, it’s his power. She regards St. Nick with what seems like an emphasis on his sainthood and worships him, perhaps filling some spiritual void born of growing up in our non-churchgoing household. Once, when she was being bossed around by her siblings, I said, “Ignore them. They’re not in charge of the world.” Without missing a beat she responded, “You’re right. Santa is.”

It seems that Santa, Mrs. Claus, and Rudolph form Caroline’s personal holy trinity as surely as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost formed mine when I was a devout Catholic girl who said her rosary every night, praying to be as good as Mary and delighting in taking part in my church’s Christmas pageant. If I allow my lapsed Catholic self to surface, I can admit to a personal preference for nativity stories over Santa ones, in part because they tie me to a heritage of faith that in other ways has slipped away from me. I grew up on Tomie dePaola’s pop-up book The First Christmas, and it, along with Margaret Wise Brown and Floyd Cooper’s A Child Is Born, are favorites in my family’s library today. The nativity book we turn to most often, however, is Julie Vivas’s The Nativity. Vivas’s art makes the text — straight from the King James Bible — accessible and wondrously human for her audience. She said of working on this book, “I’ve been pregnant. I couldn’t do a pretty Christmas book.”

Amen to that! Vivas’s pictures of a very pregnant Mary mounting and then riding on a donkey drive this point home with great humor and a subtle feminist panache. Reading this book when Rory was three, in preparation for attending Christmas Eve services with my mother, called for a certain amount of explanation of the text. Vivas’s angels wear work boots and have tattered, tie-dyed wings, and Mary, during the scene when the Archangel Gabriel comes to tell her that she will bear God’s child, is hanging the wash out on the line, oblivious to his descent. On the next spread Mary and Gabriel are seated at her kitchen table having their important conversation. The expression on Mary’s face is one of pure incredulity as she takes in the angel’s words: “Fear not Mary: for thou hast found favor with God. Thou shalt bring forth a son and call his name Jesus.” I paraphrased for Rory, “So here the angel is telling Mary that she is going to have a baby and Mary is really, really surprised about this news. Look at her — she’s like ‘Are you kidding!?’”

Rory loved this book. We read it dozens of times and brought it to the church so he could follow along with the lector. All was well until the “Fear not Mary” line resonated throughout the quiet sanctuary. Rory, taking this as his cue, called out in full voice, “And Mary was like, ARE YOU KIDDING?!” I gasped. But my mother whispered, “Oh Megan, don’t worry. Kids are what Christmas is all about,” and gave Rory a kiss on the top of his head.

When I think about the story of a long-awaited child born as a symbol of hope, my mother’s sentiment is something I want to celebrate in every season, but perhaps especially at Christmastime with all of its seemingly unavoidable family baggage and chaos. The holiday books I’ve shared with my kids hold more than just stories. They hold the memories of shared time together, and the conversations they’ve provoked have seen us navigating the emotions that come with being a family comprising people with different dispositions, hopes, and fears. I still question whether I made the right decision in telling my kids about Santa, and I am dreading the day Caroline confronts me about why the Polar Express hasn’t stopped at our house, or in some other way catches me in the big jolly lie. But I have reason to hope that she’ll come through it all OK based on how Rory’s feelings have evolved over time:

When Rory was twelve, he stayed up after his siblings went to bed to help stuff stockings and wrap presents. He was delighted by his new role and announced, “It’s even more fun to be Santa than to believe in him.” I looked at my son and recalled the night he wept over losing his belief in Santa Claus. Maybe he couldn’t hear a bell from the Polar Express, but it seemed that the tune that had slipped away from him was back. Joy to the world, indeed.

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