I (36F) Don’t Want My Husband (38M) to Read Our Kids The Giving Tree
Reddit user LovingListener247 posts about her relationship qualm for the Subreddit /r/relationships
Reddit, I am desperate for advice here. I’m sure all of you are aware of Shel Silverstein’s awful book, The Giving Tree. I shouldn’t have to plead my case for why it is such an awful book for children, but I read it when I was five or six years old, and this story traumatized me. For a week I barely spoke to anyone—not even my parents or teacher—because all I could think about was how humanity, at its core, is selfish and destructive. Even if this is true, why hit them with this in the guise of a fun children’s book that turns out to be horrifically cynical? Let them be naive for at least a few more years before letting them in on just how much the world sucks. Right?
I took great pleasure in burning my childhood copy shortly after finishing college. But, like the weed this book is, it recently popped back into my life when my husband came home with a copy last Saturday. I saw it just casually sitting on the counter, where it would have been in plain sight to the children if they had come running in. I looked at him, confused. He looked back at me, also confused. And I asked him if he was planning on discussing with me a plan about how and when to deliver this book to our kids, or if he had decided for himself to give it to them with no regards for my opinion.
It turned into him being totally flabbergasted that I hated the book. He is very fond of it and was aghast when I told him that I had burned a second edition copy of it. He went down this whole BS diatribe about how the book gave him perspective on giving and receiving; it’s a metaphor for the beauty of a parent-child relationship or whatever.
How does this man I married not see how dangerous and exploitative the boy is? The tree is trying to earn the affection of the boy as he grows into an independent adult, and she never really does, except maybe at the end when he sits on her stump, after he has destroyed everything about her.
He said, yeah, the boy feels remorse for taking everything from the tree, and that’s what it teaches kids, that they’ll also feel remorse if they take too much from a relationship.
I tried to compromise with him, saying he can get a copy of the amended version, called The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries. Although I agree the title is awkward, it’s actually a much better version and is even kind of funny. The Tree is willing to give her apples but cuts the boy off before he cuts off her branches—poetic justice in a way. It shows kids how to put a demanding bully in his place, and because they are able to harvest apples every season, the boy grows up to open a bakery that specializes in apple pies, instead of chasing more materialistic dream of building a house. (How can he even build a house with a few tree branches? He murders the tree for basically nothing!) I know for a fact our son would love it. But my husband, without even reading it, already decided he hates this version, because apparently it’s just low effort mockery. I said we could swap out the dust jacket so that when we read the book to them, it would have a normal sounding title, but still no compromise.
We argued for over an hour, then he stormed off to his computer room to look at stocks, because literally all he does with his free time is watch the stock market. Even if it is closed, he trades on the Japanese market with his buddies, and has never read a single book to our kids. That’s another reason I’m so torn about this, because I asked him to read our children a book, and he somehow he knew the one book I would shoot down, so he could get out of ever having to do this.
This dispute has been going on for three days, and he has gotten really passive aggressive by talking about how nice our dining room table is, and our set of serving spoons, and everything else in the house that’s made of wood, as if I’m supposed to just accept that backyard trees from one’s childhood have to be destroyed in order to have nice things. In our last discussion I got a bit desperate and said I’m not letting that anti-feminist trash near our kids. I thought this would change his mind, since he truly is more of a feminist than I am, but he had no idea what I was talking about. I said, “It’s a story about a man taking everything from a woman and giving nothing back in return.”
He said that was ridiculous, and that the most popular political interpretation is that it’s an anti-leftist, anti-communist story showing the fallacy of a government that gives everything away to people who never try to develop their own means in life. So we’ve gotten nowhere. I absolutely love this man—or at least I used to. Reddit, please help. I never thought a children’s book could bring my partnership to its knees, but it’s happening, and I don’t know what to do.
Edit: Some of the comments here are starting to get rather hostile, and I’m just going to go ahead and say, no, my real trauma is not with my parents or my upbringing. It is from that book, and none of your armchair therapist explanations will convince me otherwise.
Anyways, it has been a week, and I got so fed up with my husband that I told him, “Do you really want the book in our lives? Here, let me bring it into your life.” Now…I will go ahead and admit that this may have been going overboard but in a moment of fury I went to our tool shed and pulled out our chainsaw and took it to the apple tree in our front yard. He planted that tree five years ago when our daughter was born and we had only gotten one harvest of apples from it so far. But I told him this is what happens in The Giving Tree. All you end up with is a Tree stump and everyone in the story is depressed.
I maybe would feel shame for doing that, but he didn’t wait a beat to get revenge. He said, “Well let’s live in a world where no one harvests wood from trees then,” and he proceeded to haul my grandmother’s rocking chair out to the backyard and burned it, along with some of her precious antique wooden dolls. He said, “No Giving Tree, no wood.” And he made a cheeky gesture by ordering a new chair made of fiberglass, as if that’s going to replace a 100-year-old antique chair.
Reddit, please tell me I am in the right on this.
Edit 2: It has been two weeks, and we finally came to the agreement that one child will be read The Giving Tree, while the other is read The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries. However, we still haven’t come to much agreement on how to determine the more beneficial outcome. Our boy will read the original with his father, and obviously he will be more depressed that week, but we can’t agree on how to determine if stronger morals are gained in the long term. I will be reading the amended version with our girl, but she’s only five, so we can’t be certain of what information will stick. And then there’s the gender difference to take into account. I have been Googling a lot during my lunch break, and not sleeping so well, so this is still stressing me out. So if anyone here has actual constructive advice instead of death threats and dick pics just because someone on the internet has the audacity to dislike a book where a boy destroys an innocent tree then do comment, otherwise please pound sand. Thank you.
If your purpose here was to make me want to read The Giving Tree you have succeeded.