It Runs in the Family (13 page)

But what theme could a one-year-old like Seamus possibly want? He likes bananas and grapes and blueberries. He likes balls and musical instruments and being with his family. He likes taking baths and wriggling out of his diaper and dancing. Can that be a theme?

First birthday parties are not for the birthday boy or girl; they are for the parents for surviving the first year of the baby’s life. So maybe we will have a gin martini-themed party and have all the guests give us foot rubs.

When we were kids, my brother and I would bring home friends from school and have to explain who all the people were hanging out at our house. Different people walked us to school each morning, for instance. The kids thought our dad was our granddad. All our clothes were secondhand. At one point this boy in my class said to me, “You must be really rich to not care what you look like.”

We were rich in love, rich in relationships, rich in history and culture. But when you are in junior high, all you want is to fit in. Nikita Purdy was who I wanted to be. She was petite, dark skinned, and very serious. She was a good student, but she also had a lot of sass, so no one called her a nerd. I marveled at the sheer variety of bright pattern sweaters she wore. How could one person have so many sweaters? I look back at pictures of myself from junior high and cringe. I was chubby, freckled, and always wore political T-shirts. In fifth grade I wore one about the Nestle boycott every other day. It was gross. Patrick’s favorite shirt had a cartoon of President George H. W. Bush on it, looking like a grimacing Frankenstein. The T-shirt read: “Son of Reaganstein: In His Most Chilling Role Ever (from the makers of Contragate zombies).” I also had a red T-shirt with a picture of Emma Goldman on the front with the quote “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” I loved that tee and wore it to shreds, but I didn’t venture onto a dance floor until late in high school. Patrick got into trouble once over his “Columbus didn’t discover America, he invaded it” shirt because one of the Native Americans depicted on the shirt was breastfeeding and a girl in his class complained to the teacher that there was a boob on the shirt.

All Nikita Purdy’s T-shirts also made a statement: “I am cool.” Maybe the one way I do rebel against my upbringing is that to this day I hate wearing T-shirts with slogans on them.

Later on, it dawned on us that the new clothes that some of our classmates wore on the first day of school meant that the bills didn’t get paid at the end of the month. We also realized that we weren’t the only kids in class with parents in jail. It occurred to us that maybe the only thing worse than sitting down to dinner each night with ten adults, was having no adults around.

Patrick’s parents did not have a lot of money either. They lived simply for the same reasons as my parents: to be in solidarity, to be war tax resisters, to live lightly on the Earth. But even as he and his older sister kept a tally of their deprivations, Patrick was also aware of the wealth of experience and opportunity his parents shared with them. When Joanne served on the War Resisters International Council, they traveled to India, Sweden, Germany and other countries as a family to experience different cultures. And their parents made time for them: “My dad came to my class and read to me and the other kids. Maybe my mom did it too, but it was more noteworthy that my dad did it because he was the only dad. I was so proud that he came to class and gave his time to us.”

Patrick didn’t spend the week before the first day of school figuring out what he was going to wear. But for me, “back to school” was a big deal. For the first day of school, the kids at my school set the bar pretty high. The name of the game at Mount Royal Elementary Middle School was color coordination. Kids came back to school looking like they had spent all summer matching their pants to their shirts to their socks to their shoes. Everything was brand new—the clothes, of course, but also the tennis shoes, lunch boxes, thermoses, and backpacks.

As die-hard Catholic anarchists and peace activists whose monthly salary was in the low hundreds, my parents were no more going to buy us new clothes than start working for Lockheed Martin or the Pentagon. My Dad rotated through three or four outfits, repairing his own work pants when they sported holes. He was on constant watch for waste, avarice, and spendthriftness—in his kids as much as in the culture at large. He enjoined us to reuse, repair, and always be reexamining our needs.

Every summer, we spent one stressful, unsatisfying day shopping with our mom to get ready for school. We bought off-brand shoes, underpants, and socks and then hit the thrift store for clothes. Mom was not looking for the trendiest brands or the most stylish threads. She made sure the clothes fit and weren’t worn out. I tried to be fashionable, but it wasn’t easy.

Once I jazzed up my secondhand brown tennis shoes by sticking reinforcements all over them—the little white circles used to extend the life of loose-leaf paper in a Trapper Keeper. Patrick still remembers wearing his first-ever brand new pair of jeans (a size too small) on his first day of junior high. When Shaker knit sweaters were the thing (actually, the year
after
they were the big thing), I showed up wearing two—along with two matching pairs of socks scrunched just so beneath my rolled-up jeans. I have another dim memory—best forgotten—of showing up on the first day of middle school wearing a three-cornered hat. It was the coolest thing I ever owned right up until the moment the other kids saw it.

These days, Macklemore is making bank singing about shopping in thrift shops and wearing your grandfather’s clothes. And CeeLo Green and the Goodie Mob have a back-to-school-worthy anthem called “Special Education.”

I don’t wear the clothes you wear

I’m just different and I don’t care

It’s kind of sad and it’s a shame

Everyone wants to be the same
.

It doesn’t sound like most people in the United States are getting CeeLo’s message though. Only the capitalist craze of Christmas is a bigger bonanza to retailers than back-to-school season when the average U.S. household will spend $634.78 on apparel, shoes, supplies, and electronics, according to the National Retail Federation. Total spending on back-to-school merchandise is expected to reach $26.7 billion, but when combined with back-to-college spending, the total will climb to more than $72 billion.

But here is the NRF statistic that staggered me: “95.3 percent of those with school-age children will spend an average of $230.85 on fall sweaters, denim, and other chic pieces of attire. Additionally, families will spend on shoes ($114.39) and school supplies ($90.49).”

We bought Rosena some secondhand clothes, as well as a new backpack. And her mom bought her new shoes. But that was all. We walked Rosena to her first day of first grade. She looked great and more importantly, she felt comfortable in her thrift shop finery. She was a little nervous and very excited as we got closer to school. But all the nervousness disappeared when she saw the other kids. We could hardly get her to stand still to say goodbye to us before she ran off to join the throng.

Watching the kids scamper into the building, I was heartened. No two kids looked the same. They were a riot of color and pattern—stripes, especially, were big. Some were dressed up, but mostly kids looked clean and fresh and comfortable and ready for the fun of learning. It was beautiful.

I got my first cell phone in 2003 and I have not upgraded it since then. It is a flip phone that makes and receives calls and sends and accepts text messages. Supposedly it has a camera, but I don’t know how it works. When I send a text message it is almost like I am deploying smoke signals—choose the right spot, make the fire, get it smoky, start waving the blanket. To say “hi,” I must tap the four button two times, wait a beat and then tap it three times. Each text message is an artisanal product made with painstaking care.

Seamus was curious about my cell phone from the beginning. Whenever I hold it, he wants it. If I am on the phone, he tries to pull it out of my hands. He loves opening and closing it, and he loves the noises it makes when messages come in. He is forever calling Ali and Amanda, the first two entries in my address book. But it is just a simple phone: no games, no stories, no excitement.

At the doctor’s office and in line at the post office, I see kids not that much older than Seamus using cell phones and handheld games with a confidence and alacrity that I will never have. I have never even held a tablet computer in my hands.

Seamus and I took the train from New London to Baltimore when he was about a year old. I packed toys for him, crossword puzzles for me, and snacks for both of us. It was a six or seven hour trip. I pulled out a crossword puzzle once while he was asleep and draped it across my lap. It was not easy to work on the puzzle around his little body. I spent the rest of the time trying to keep him from catapulting down the aisle, helping him play peek-a-boo with our neighbors, taking him for short walks, chitchatting with his admirers, reading him the same two books over and over again, and trying to get him interested in the postindustrial wasteland outside the train window. All he wanted to do was lick the window itself.

It was not a relaxing trip, but we had a good time. As we got off the train in Baltimore, I noticed a woman with a two- or three-year-old girl in our train car. I had neither seen nor heard them the entire trip. The little girl had big pink headphones on and was glued to a tiny screen. Her mom was glued to her own, slightly larger screen. I felt a twinge of envy. With all that quiet, the mom could have easily finished a crossword puzzle. But then I felt a twinge of sadness. They were missing out on each other, I thought. Looking at them, I saw a moment of total detachment.

This got me wondering: is there technology meant just for toddlers? I discovered that the $99 nabi tablet junior is marketed to kids as young as three. It has a 180-degree camera and video recorder. Kids can watch movies, play games, and learn math and reading through educational games. Kids can drop it, smear it with sunflower butter, lick it, and it survives. After reading through the website, I felt almost bad for little deprived Seamus. He should have one! Otherwise the other kids will have an edge on him. I don’t want him to be left behind. I don’t want him to be bored. I grew up bored. No TV, no computer, no nabi junior. Just books and people and pads of paper for drawing and writing. My mother always said: “Only boring people get bored.” Her message: develop a rich inner life, nurture a vivid imagination, cultivate the gift of conversation, and you will never be bored.

But we were definitely bored as kids. Bored and deprived. No Atari or Sega or Talking Barbie. We eventually got a computer, but it was the “peace and justice machine” where we were allowed to write our papers for school and nothing more.

We weren’t allowed to chat on the telephone either. Our parents enforced a strict “five-minute rule” all the way through high school: “The phone is a shared tool of communication for everyone who lives here. Don’t hog it by yapping with kids you spent all day with and are going to see again tomorrow.”

As a result, I never learned to multitask. Most of my friends had their own phone lines, so they could do their homework, chat on the phone, and watch TV all at the same time. One friend was so accomplished at this technique that she managed to be a National Merit Honor Scholar; another finished second in our class. Unlike them, I could only do one thing at a time.

However, perhaps multitasking is overrated in the long run. Dr. Teresa Bolton, a professor at the University of East Anglia’s School of Education and Lifelong Learning in the UK, interviewed artists, writers, and scientists who all reported that boredom spurred their exploration and creativity. Dr. Bolton concluded that “Children need to have stand-and-stare time, time imagining and pursuing their own thinking processes or assimilating their experiences through play or just observing the world around them.”

Thanks to my childhood, I can occupy myself for hours. I do not need to be entertained, and I get the most satisfaction from crossword puzzles, novels, magazines, newspapers, conversations, writing in my journal, and just observing the world. I don’t get jittery or go into withdrawal without some form of entertainment. I was never able to develop the addiction in the first place. I recently read about a four-year-old in England who went through all the symptoms of classic withdrawal when her iPad was taken away. She was using it for three or four hours a day. Her parents were forced to enroll her in digital detox and compulsive behavior therapy. Yet, despite this possibility, half of all parents interviewed for one UK survey say they let their babies play with their smartphones or tablets. I like my tactile world of newspapers, snapshots, and books. I like the heft and texture of blocks and puzzles and games. I like talking to the people I encounter throughout the day—even the casual, nonverbal interchange of two people passing on the street. I like the feeling of wet grass between my toes and squishy mud on my heels. I want all of that for Rosena, Seamus and Madeline too. There will be plenty of time for the world to be mediated, distorted, and upended by technology when they are older. For now, and for the next few years, we are saying no—as does the American Academy of Pediatrics—to all the beeping, whizzing, vibrating, touch-screen gizmos. We are saying yes to imagination, creativity, and a little bit of old-fashioned boredom.