So things got bad for Thomas More at the end of his life, and in Roper’s Life of Thomas More, there is a moment that makes me very sad. It’s not when he says goodbye to his children or his wife, it’s not when he’s convicted because of lies, it’s not when they take him to be executed.
It’s when they take his books away.
And last night, we had to do that to Margaret. She loves sleeping with books, but she has taken to shredding them up, which is wicked. We gave her a warning that the next time she did it, we would have to take her books away, and yesterday during her “nap,” she did it again. On interrogation, she told us that she was trying to make a puzzle, which made us sad, but we took the books away anyway, because much though I love her, she is not going to get a chance to make a puzzle out of my heirloom World of Christopher Robin that I got for my fourth birthday. So Leo read her stories, and got ready to leave. She told him that he should pull up the covers, and she would look at pictures.
He had to take the books out with him.
There was much consternation. To put it mildly. And I’m not really proof against the howls of the toddler who can’t go to sleep without having some books. It was terrible.
So I grabbed her some board books to look at (you know, in the dark) because her wails were hurting me.
And then when I went in to make sure that she had left her clothes on and was under the covers, this is how I found her.
My heart hurts.
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