Dear Judy Blume, 

When I was in 3rd grade, I was Peter’s mother. 

My teacher really liked theater. She staged her own adaptations of Fiddler on the Roof, Annie Get Your Gun and Bye, Bye Birdie. Only in high school when learning more about theater and copyrights did I discover that oh, that was super illegal. You cannot just rewrite a famous musical, insert your own song choices wherever and have elementary school students perform them. But oh well. It was the 80s. Stuff happened. Nobody documented it on the internet. 

She also wrote her own adaptation of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing for us to perform. We read the book in class before she made the announcement that we would be performing four chapters of the play. So we needed four Peters, four Fudge’s, four Mrs. Hatchers, and a lot of supporting characters.  

The choice of roles for girls, if I remember, were Mrs. Hatcher, Sheila, and Fudge’s friend from the birthday party who peed on the floor and bites.  I didn’t really think I had the comedic chops to bite or deftly pour water from a cup to make it look like a bathroom accident so I put Mrs. Hatcher on my preference sheet, and  I was cast as Peter’s mom from the Dribble chapter, so I did get to be a little dramatic, rushing Fudge to the hospital after swallowing the turtle. 

I thought about that scene years later when introducing the books to my own children. When my son was ready, I got him a copy of the  book just like the one I had read: green cover with Fudge cutting his hair, Dribble crawling across the floor. He read the book on his own, and loved it, following up with Superfudge on his own. 

My daughters received a box set of your books for Christmas, and I insisted we start with this one, reading a chapter a night to them before bed. They weren’t too sure at first. This book is about a boy? But soon they were giggling at Fudge, thought Sheila had good points, and really liked the Birthday chapter. 

My youngest started to get a little restless though. No pictures in the version that we had. Stick with it, I told her, because something wild happens at the end and they have to go to the hospital. Immediately they both started guessing what it could be. Does their mom have a baby? Does Fudge break his arm? “Nope,” I answered to each of their questions. “You’ll never guess.”

When they kept trying, I finally said, not as a spoiler, but because I knew they wouldn’t believe me, “Fudge eats Dribble. Fudge eats the turtle.” 

They exploded into laughter, totally believing that I had made up the whole thing. Even though I was no longer the mom in the play, but now the mom reading the story, I loved watching their faces as we started that last chapter and as the pieces of the plot started building they discovered that the unbelievable claim, “Fudge eats the turtle,” was actually going to happen. 

We moved through Superfudge next, and I saw myself wondering about Mrs. Hatcher, my old theater character a little more. In Superfudge, Mrs. Hatcher has their baby sister, the family moves to Princeton, New Jersey, where Mr. Hatcher is writing a book and Mrs. Hatcher decides to start taking college classes. While she spent most of 4th Grade Nothing chasing after Fudge, and I spent my acting stint depicting this while wearing an apron to show I was a mom, I was happy to see this side of Mrs. Hatcher in the next book–trying to find her way out of that post-baby fog, that time when as a mom you’re just trying to figure out who you are again, and I found myself rooting for Mrs.Hatcher to find herself as a person and not just a mom in an apron rushing her kid to the hospital. 

It’s easy to lose yourself as a person when rushing kids from activity to activity, or rushing them to the hospital after they eat a turtle. Maybe that’s why my teacher was writing all those plays for us to perform, copyrighted or not. While I judged her a lot for that when I was 17, because of course I was 17, and I knew everything, but now, at 44, wondering what I’m doing in education half the time, wondering who I am as a mother, as a person, I recognize that maybe she was just trying to find a part of herself too

We haven’t read Fudge-a-Mania yet. Got sidetracked by a request for Junie B. Jones. But I know that one promises more Sheila, which I know my daughters will like, and I’m hoping a little more story for Mrs. Hatcher, maybe a new career, an adventure, maybe a little hope.