Books |
Love You Forever
Robert Munsch
By
Published: Nov 02, 2020
Category:
Children
“A daughter is her father’s heart, walking away on feet.”
Gospel truth. I live it every day. The Child you met in these pages a long, long time ago became The Small Person, and is now, at 18, The Young Adult. She’s at a college 3,000 miles away. Every cliché applies.
Barack Obama, speaking of his daughters, understood the reality: “When they’re teens, you get an hour.” An hour! And he was the President!
So of course I’m a fan of “Love You Forever,” an illustrated book allegedly to be read aloud to 4-to-8-year-olds. In 40 years, 15 million copies have been sold. It’s been widely translated. Call it a classic? Yes, and then some. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
The story is simple. On the first spread, a mother –– in a long cotton nightgown, seated in a comfortable chair, with her cat looking on — sings to her new baby:
“I’ll love you forever
I’ll like you for always
As long as I’m living
My baby you’ll be.”
At two, her little boy will pull food from shelves, flush her watch, drive her crazy. But at night the mother will sneak into his room and pick him up and rock him in her arms and sing those four lines. The boy will be 9, and impossible. But at night… A teenager, and worse. But at night…
Let’s just say it goes on. In ways that no 4-year-old could understand. Just watch it:
It gets goopy now, because now I’m going to tell you how this book came to be. Robert Munsch wrote this book for a child — a child he never knew. A stillborn baby. His wife’s second. And the verdict on the future was in; she could never give birth.
There’s a happy ending: Munsch and his wife adopted three children. But in that initially devastating moment, let’s add another element: Robert Munsch writes children’s books. No way could he write about this. But a song — “my way of crying” — came to him. Later, the story appeared. All he had to do is write it down.
His publisher rejected the book. Too dark for little kids. His distributor stepped in. “He said when he read it, he just felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.” Readers have, for 40 years, known that feeling.
This book presents beliefs as settled truth. Two things, Munsch says, don’t change. A parent’s love is absolute. As is a child’s love for a parent. Alas, exceptions come quickly to mind. Ignore them. Imagine yourself sitting alone, in the quiet of the evening, seeing, behind moist eyes, another movie, the best, most intimate movie — the movie of our loved ones and how very much we love them, how, in the end, we live for them. Remember precious moments, and the purity of the emotions you felt. Your first sight of your child. First steps. Reaching for your hand. And your heart, walking away on feet.
