The Little Prince in Me Anonymous

“They’re only words on paper!” I shouted as I closed my picture book with frustration. My mother would frown at my naive six year old self while attempting to explain the fallacy of my outburst. She’d try - to no avail - to convince me that reading was a powerful tool in life. I couldn’t see the significance of some ink blotches on laminated pages. In part, I attribute my inability to realize the importance of developing my reading and writing skills to the fact that my mother was not there to instill the notion that books were much more than collections of processed trees; they are something more extraordinary: a communicable manifestation of creativity and abstractions.

I just didn’t understand that.

My mother wasn’t there to guide my development in learning English because I lived with my grandparents until I reached the age of eleven. Prior to moving to our current neighborhood, my mother and father lived in a small apartment in a poverty-stricken area. Additionally, they both worked full-time in hopes of someday achieving a future more fortunate and more lucrative than their present. Not only did they have no time to care for me, but they also wanted to ensure that I went to school in a better environment. To them, I was...