Since that day in 2001 when my daughter and I tried and failed to play literacy games in the car, I have spent a great deal of my time writing this thesis. I had a second child, a little boy who turned three while I was madly completing it. I worked with family support groups who wanted to integrate literacy into their work with young families. I was living inside and through the discourses of literacy and mothering, even as I tried to live outside them to read, write, and analyze their power/knowledge in shaping institutional practices, and my personal experiences of mothering. I could not help but apply the literacy advice I read for the purposes of this study to my own mothering practices. By the standards of most literacy advice, particularly texts written in the last few years, I don’t spend enough time with my children. I don’t take as many opportunities as I could to stimulate my son’s language development. I find the mess of painting and crafts an added stress and am grateful he goes to a daycare where they are set up for this. I want my children to take music lessons but they aren’t interested. I eventually refused to sign off on my daughters’ reading log every evening, explaining to her teacher that at nine years old, she needed to monitor her own reading, if such a thing was necessary. She reads when she feels like it and still prefers if I read to her, something I like to do at the end of a long day, if I am not too tired and especially if it’s a good book.
I read to our three year old son, but then so does everyone in the home including his sister and his father. I check that my daughter’s homework is done because I feel it reflects badly upon me if I don’t and I want her to be good at math. But it is her father who most often helps her with homework, and we made a decision to put her in a school where she didn’t get hours of homework every night, even if it meant that my working days were shortened considerably by driving and carpooling her to a school farther away. These activities for supporting my children’s literacy and learning are dependent upon my “flexible” schedule and the social support networks we are able to draw upon. These networks help to share in the work of raising our children and getting them through school, and they provide a useful barometer for how well I am performing my domestic literacy work. It is nice to know that other mothers forget it was their turn to pick up the kids from school (I haven’t yet come across a group of fathers who have organized a car pool, but fathers do also forget it was their turn to pick up), and that all the domestic literacy work in the world won’t prevent a child from needing a tutor, or preferring to watch “The Simpsons” instead of reading that chapter book from the library.