Midnight Sun and My First Love

My tween heart exploded this week when I finally got to read Midnight Sun. Please don’t laugh like my husband did, though I’d forgive you because I’m unapologetic. If you’re not familiar, it’s from the Twilight book series, and it’s been 15 years in the making. Now, I say tween, but have to admit that when these books came out, I had already survived my tween years. I was twenty years old, a newlywed, and at the time, I worked at a middle school. I remember actual tween girls gushing over this book and how much they loved it and were “literally dying” for the movie to come out. I can still hear their squeals and giggles as they watched the trailer for the first time and gushed over Edward, the love interest/vampire. This was in the early days of YouTube, way back when middle schoolers didn’t have smartphones and needed to use the teacher’s computer with permission.

I chuckled to myself at their reaction, but it also drove me crazy to be completely unaware of any book that garnered such a response. So I went to the mall and picked up a paperback copy of the first book. I flew through the pages, and less than 24 hours later, I finished it while sitting in a booth at Buffalo Wild Wings with my husband and friends who were watching football. I wouldn’t have been interested in the game anyway, but with Twilight in my hands, I was entirely unaware of my surroundings and living vicariously in the Pacific Northwest. I looked up from the final page, checked the time, and then hopped in my car. I made it to the mall 10 minutes before closing and walked out minutes later with the next book in hand. That night was probably the only night I would ever be thankful football games are so long. I got back to the restaurant and started reading New Moon before the game had even ended.

I tore through the Twilight series with a voraciousness that I’ve experienced with many other books in my lifetime. I hate to put the good ones down. I think about them. I stay up late into the night reading and then dream about them. I smile, laugh, cry, and sob; I become completely engrossed in the lives of the characters and how it plays out across the pages of a book. During the first five years of our marriage, I pursued and completed a degree in English with a history minor, reading tons more. I discovered a passion for things that wouldn’t just be called books but might earn the title ‘literature.’ I loved to challenge myself with prose that encouraged critical thinking and epitomized the art of writing.

I love reading. Or, rather, I used to pre-kids. Lately— meaning for years— reading has felt like a chore. I want to read. I want to read books that educate, that inspire introspection, and words that make me think and feel. I want to read books with weight, like Anna Karenina, which I’ve started four times since having kids but have yet to make it far enough to know what it’s about (besides a woman named Anna Karenina). As a mom, when I try to read, my brain doesn’t cooperate. It’s hard to make your way through 800 pages of literature when you need to stop every page or less to take care of someone else’s needs.

But this week, I picked up Midnight Sun, giddy with excitement, and I turned off the part of me that told me what I “should” read. I ignored the internal voice chiding me for literary tastes more like a tween and less like a thirty-something mom of four. And I definitely ignored my husband’s chuckles— which are deserved because I unwillingly took him to see the midnight release of all five of the movies. Instead, I just read, flying through the pages like I used to, seeing it in my head like a movie— a far better film than the one that exists. I remembered my first love of reading and abandoned any other literary expectations.

It’s weird the unnecessary expectations and pressure I put on myself. Like the ridiculous desire to do things perfectly or keep an HGTV worthy home, I often face self-imposed expectations that aren’t necessary. My word for 2020 was abandon. I have worked on abandoning unnecessary weight, like cultural standards and self-inflicted guilt. I’ve had no choice but to abandon plans and most of my expectations of what this year would look like. Now I’m finding out I even need to abandon what I think reading and art should look like. Turns out, it’s a fun lesson to learn. It makes me happy to live temporarily in a world of beautiful vampires and experience impassioned teenagers’, and first love. It reminds me of my own first love– my love of reading.