I’ve spent a fair amount of time in October away from home visiting relatives. The trips weren’t hard, but at the end of my travels, I was glad to be home. The first morning I returned, I started my journal entry “Home again . . . .” And a phrase popped into my mind, “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.”
Memories of the old Mother Goose rhyme floated through my head. I remembered sitting on the couch beside my grandmother, my younger brother on her other side, as she read to us from an old book of rhymes. I could hear her voice reading, “To market, to market, to buy a fat pig, home again, home again, jiggety-jig.”
Our stack of children’s books (Well, World War II Combat Aircraft is not really for children. It’s for my husband.)
Then I wondered, did I read Mother Goose rhymes to my kids? I think I did. Surely, I did. But I couldn’t really remember.
I could remember reading to them most evenings at bedtime for several years. I could remember many of the books we read. But I couldn’t remember reading Mother Goose to them.
I finally went to the basement to review a small stack of children’s books I’ve kept. The Real Mother Goose was in the stack. I felt much better about my parenting skills—childhood isn’t complete without experiencing the cadence and silliness of Mother Goose.
Cover of our copy of The Real Mother Goose
Of course, Mother Goose wasn’t always silly. That “to market, to market” line used to really mean something—when people went to market and on good days came home with a pig.
Driving to the supermarket to buy a ham isn’t quite the same thing.
I once won a mock Jeopardy contest in high school because of my knowledge of Mother Goose. The answer was “Robin Redbreast’s girlfriend.” I was the only one in Junior Honors English who knew the correct question was “Who was Jenny Wren?” That knowledge was outmoded in 1972, and it can only be more esoteric today.
At what point will Mother Goose rhymes cease to have any meaning for our society? When will buying pigs at the market and eating hot cross buns seem like so much nonsense. We’re already there with curds and whey, though those of us who like cottage cheese have some idea of what Little Miss Muffet ate.
Little Boy Blue and Little Bo Peep might lose their sheep, but how many children today understand that that meant the family’s income for the year was gone? And who knows why Jack no longer jumps over a candlestick?
As new cherished works are written—the world is better off with Roald Dahl and Shel Silverstein, though I didn’t read either of them as a kid—we will have to winnow out the old. Still, it will be a loss when children no longer hear Mother Goose.
Do people read Mother Goose to their kids these days? Leave a comment mentioning the last time you read Mother Goose and with whom you read it.
