I was embarrassed. The book police should hunt me down.

I hadn’t been in our public library for several years. I’m an author with a book on library shelves but I’m so busy writing that I don’t get a chance to read. And to make things worse, none of my kids turned out to be “readers,” despite the walls of books and reading material crowding us out of our house.

Then my youngest son came along and changed all that. I started buying him books because I was so amazed that he actually read them. Then I had a brilliant idea. I would introduce him to the concept of “borrowing books”.

We set the date and trotted off to the local library to get a card and some books. On the way home I had to endure comments that reminded me of how remiss I had been in not introducing him the idea sooner.

First he asked, “How does a library work exactly?” And after getting his card, he commented, “I feel so lucky knowing that I can get all these books now.” On the way home just to rub it in, he added, “This is one of the best days of my holiday – I now know about libraries.”

Mothers like me should be locked up or at least fined by the literacy police.