to kill a mockingbird

I finished Lee Harper’s ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ today.

Atticus Finch just became my hero. His children were motherless, and he raised them rather wild, but they grew up reading newspapers and discussing editorials with him. He was a lawyer, and it was said he was the same man inside the house as he was on the streets. He spoke to the children as if they were grown-ups, and he listened to them.

His daughter, Scout, was seven, but he taught her to ‘wear someone else’s skin and walk around in it’ if she wanted to understand people. He taught her how to act with dignity, and how to fight her own battles. He asked an uncle to teach his son Jem to shoot because he said he was too old to bother with guns, but Jem would later discover that in his youth, he was a respected sharpshooter, and he can still shoot, and that sometimes it is wise not to flaunt what you have every chance you got.

Atticus is a work of fiction, but his life, in the eyes of a little girl, teaches you what it means to be a good person. Being good does not mean faultless. It means trying your best to uphold what you value, being brave enough to acknowledge your mistakes and catch the lessons, and standing up for something even in the midst of adversity.

As children, we are raised to never challenge the wisdom of parents. Parents are the absolute authorities, and we believed without question. But as parents, when do you start teaching your children that even parents make mistakes? As parents, how do you acknowledge that you may believe you are acting on the best interests of the child, but in the end, each person, even a little person, has to live his own life? How do you teach your child to stand up for himself without compromising the rules of the world he lives in?

Tough questions. The book does not answer them. The book made me evaluate some of the convictions I held, and some of the practices I do as a parent, simply because I thought it was expected of me. The book made me aware of what my child sees when she looks at me.

Atticus also taught his children that it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. You’d have to read it to find out why. It’s beautiful.