Lauren's Literacy Narrative

       The double-edged sword of my dad’s influence and the nurturing nature of my mom’s sponsorship lead me to today. I still love to read fantasy novels and write whatever my imagination conjures up. My writing prowess also manifests in the essays I have to write for college, which are unfortunately more draining due to the lack of creative freedom. At least with the blog genre, I have less constraints on the writing choices I can make. Being able to include pictures in this format helps give life to the points I made in my literacy narrative.      At Professor Conner's suggestion, I submitted my personal narrative essay to the College for a first year writing competition. I've never been confident in my writing (despite Mom's belief that everything I write deserves to be published), so I don't expect to win. It would be a nice conclusion to my first year here if I did, though.

     Dad is and always has been the polar opposite of my mom . You'll notice in the linked post that I've included a photo of her and I together. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so what does it mean that I don't have a single picture with my dad on my phone? For the sake of maintaining uniformity between posts, here's a photo of the type of father I wish I'd had growing up:     This is Bandit, the dad from popular Australian cartoon Bluey. He's a great father who loves his daughters; he encourages their imaginations by playing games with them and always shows them he loves them.     Unlike the little girls in the cartoon, I've never been close to my dad. Like Bandit, he fostered my  imagination when I was little, but not for the better. I hated going to his house for court-mandated visitations every other weekend, so I would mope the whole time. The only thing he could do to stop me from crying (or getting angry) was to placate me with books. E

      Let me introduce you to my mother Stacey, who I cited in a previous post as the positive influence on my literacy journey.       She's been an elementary school teacher for thirty years now, so she has a good grasp of what's appropriate for children to read. She would take me to the county library to check out the Magic Treehouse books or the Junie B. Jones series, or whatever else caught my eye. Every time the scholastic book fair came to my school, she would let me buy as many books as I wanted. I was pushed to get as many A.R.  — accelerated reading  — test points as possible.     I would get mad at her when she forbade me to read something I was interested in, especially if it was something Dad was okay with. Looking back now, I understand she was doing what was best for me. Mom knew that even though I could comprehend certain books meant for older audiences, I wasn't mentally mature enough to handle them. Keep this stored in your mind for comparison when you rea