Reading News
The news for our chapter is that we don’t have a leader. We have women on the roster ready to volunteer, but no one to lead us. If you have ever contemplated where you fit in on the issue of child abuse, we encourage you to act now. The simplest solution is to join our chapter and add your name to the list of women ready to volunteer when the chapter is up and running! The more difficult solution is to go FIRST and contact us about establishing and leading this chapter.
Please watch this video and consider being the nut who brings the Chicktime movement to your area… and watch what happens to the radical love that will develop in your local community… one connection at a time.
Join our chapter by clicking the ‘subscribe’ button below and selecting our chapter from the drop down menu. You are welcome to fill out the web form multiple times if you want to join more than one chapter.
To explore Chicktime leadership, please click on the link to the left and read the free copy of our book, Chicktime. Pay special attention to chapters 4 & 5 to learn the nitty gritty of establishing a chapter and the responsibilities of the local leader. You may contact us at info@chicktime.com for more information (but we prefer that you read our very short book first!) 🙂
I’d arrive in the church basement that held the day care and without fail, Gerry would be at a near-by table in her baggy white Betty Boop t-shirt cutting a deck of cards. She’d see me and smile.
“Want to round-up a game?” she’d ask.
Together, we’d enlist teammates and get a game going. Gerry and I would talk as we played. Not about anything important or earth-shattering, we’d just talk. She always seemed interested in what I had to say and as I chattered away about whatever nonsense was on my young mind she would do something that few adults in my life ever bothered to do. She’d listen.
I don’t know that Gerry took any more interest in me than she did any of the other kids at the daycare but I know that the time she spent with me made me feel important and cared about. At that point in my life I needed more than anything to be cared about.
I grew up with a single mother who was mentally unstable and , most likely due to her illness, was physically and mentally abusive to me and my younger half-brother. My father was not in the picture for the first sixteen years of my life because my mother “never thought about” introducing him and I. I was lonely, uncared about and scared. Playing Gin Rummy in the church basement with Gerry gave me a taste of what it meant to have someone spend time with me and care for me.
Gerry was the woman with whom I spent almost every day of four or five years, but she was not the only woman to take an interest in me. My step-Grandmother also showed me love and affection. Grandma, although she had many flaws, was the one adult that I felt I could talk to about anything. When things got tough for me at home I’d spend a weekend with her at my Grandparent’s farm. We’d sit around her scarred kitchen table and chit-chat well past my bed time while watching “The Golden Girls” on her black and white T.V. set. She knew and shared my love of books. It was my Grandma who gave me the best advice I’ve ever received to this day.
“Read, Missie,” she’d tell me. “When it gets hard, just read.”
So I did. I read my way through countless screaming matches, various belt beatings and one removal from my home by Children and Youth Services. I read my way through a year of “family placement” and the long-awaited father/daughter reunion when I was sixteen. One book could take me places I’d never hope to see or teach me things that “normal” kids already seemed to know.
Things got better as I grew older but I never stopped reading and, eventually, I found the path to my own writing which helped to empower me in even more ways than reading other people’s words had. I may have forgotten how to play Gin Rummy but I’ve never forgotten the woman who taught me how to play. Nor have I forgotten all those late nights around a kitchen table.
I am now almost thirty, a mother to a beautiful seven year-old daughter, married to the most charmingly humorous man I have ever met and am an honors student in college where, I am studying to be a writer. My life is coming together better than I could have imagined when I was a child but it is still far from perfect. I’m not quite yet the person that I would wish to be.
If I could be anyone I wanted to be, (which, of course, I can be whomever I choose to be, I know that now) I would choose to be the kind of woman who teaches a seemingly inconsequential game to a heart-broken child or advises them with the sage advice to lose themselves in their favorite hobby when reality is too tough to handle.
I do choose to be that woman, and that is why I chose to begin Chicktime Reading. Through this organization I hope to encourage and empower as many young girls as I am capable of reaching. I believe in the power of passions but I also believe that the most power comes from sharing and encouraging those passions. The more of us that reach out to a child, the farther our love will reach. I encourage you to also choose to be the kind of woman that isn’t afraid to open her heart to a child who is aching. Join me as Chicktime Reading begins to fill the hearts of girls in our community who would otherwise not know what it means to be loved. For monthly updates, please use the link below to subscribe to Chicktime Reading. I’d also love to hear from you personally.
With love,
Missie
Melissa Hart
Mjhart124@yahoo.com
Chicktime Reading Founder
