Love You Forever - book

At a high school graduation I attended many years ago, I remember them reading Love You Forever, a children's book by Robert Munsch (LINK).

I remembered this being a truly sweet, touching story about the deep, abiding love a mother has for her children.  And on many levels, it is.

And on other levels, it's super-creepy and stalkery.  And I say this as a mom who loves to watch her perfect daughter sleep.  It got all weird about four pages in.

The rest of this is pretty much going to be a spoiler, so go ahead and stop reading if you don't want to have the book ruined.  But, I mean, it's something like 18 pages, so really you should have read it by now if you haven't.  Anyway.

It starts with a new mother rocking her baby while it sleeps, singing to the child.  So sweet, we can all relate.  I love it!

Next she does the same to her two-year-old, who she earlier equated living with to living in a zoo.  But whatevs, it's still very sweet and I get it.

The mother continues doing this when the boy is 9, when he's a teenager.  She creeps into his room on her hands and knees, then takes the sleeping child/sullen teen into her lap to rock to sleep.  The clock in the shot with the teenager shows she's doing this at, like, 1:30 a.m.   Which means she is either staying up late enough to do this with this express purpose in mind, or she's setting an alarm to do it.  Either way, that crap just got weird.

So, let's assume it stops after he moves out, right?  Oh, no.  She leaves her house in her car in the middle of the night WITH A LADDER STRAPPED TO THE TOP, and drives across town to his house.  She puts the ladder up to the window, crawls into his room like a cat burglar, and does this:

See how you can see the ladder back there in the window?  Yeah.  That's not creepy AT ALL.  I assume Granny McWhitehair then ninjas her way back down the 15-foot-ladder, puts it back on the roof of her car all by herself (totally plausible, by the way), and then drives home.  

I'm not going to finish spoiling the book, partially because it's very sweet and I'd feel guilty about it, and partially because it seems like a rude thing to totally spoil it.

But, anyway.  Go ahead and buy this book for your child and read it nightly if you want them to check under their bed for you when they're 40.  Your call.