The Winter of Our Disconnect (29 page)

Couldn’t help but compare it with A.’s eighteenth b/day dinner last October, when B. & S. begged to be allowed to sit in the car—i.e., access iPod and DS—the moment meals were cleared.

 

 

 

Much of day spent munching on a devo burger, as Suss would say. [“Devo” = devastated.] Can’t be PMS as no longer have the M. May have gone overboard on the renunciation thing. Realized today on return from early-morning walk—new routine—that, in addition to giving up media, I have renounced my cigarette (had been allowing myself one a day, like a vitamin) plus—thanks to Atkins—alcohol, sweets, bread, pasta, and rice. Sheesh. As fate would have it, am also celibate, so there is literally nothing left to give up.

S. holed up in A.’s room making her first-ever mix tape. We are going to play it in the car. S. also spent FOUR HOURS deep cleaning—like flossing, practically—her bedroom. Was almost frightened to see her in action. Later showed me several neat pages of math revision for tomorrow’s test. WTF?!

 

 

 

Bill to me in car: “So who’s this Kafka, anyway?”

Death of Atkins celebrations tonight with Mary and Grant and family: spaghetti carbonara, sausage risotto, cookies, and Suss’s amazing chocolate cupcakes.

After dinner, the assembled kids (aged sixteen, fifteen, and fourteen) played hide-and-seek. B. folded himself up like an unassembled IKEA wall unit and hid on a closet shelf.

 

 

 

S., enigmatically: “I think The Experiment is finally beginning to work on me.” Then the phone rang, alas, and she fled.

When questioned later, added: “I’m doing shiz now—baking cupcakes, writing in my journal [she has a
journal
?????], planning a novel [she’s planning a
NOVEL
?????]. You know, like . . . shiz.”

» 7

Eat, Play, Sleep

—WALDEN,
chapter 11

 

 

 

 

 

 

My first child, Anni, was a breast-fed, demand-fed baby. To varying degrees, all my children were. Breast milk was never really fast enough on the draw for Bill, although he humored me for six or seven months (if fussing and spitting up and looking continually aggrieved is your idea of humoring). Suss wasn’t exactly a poster child for La Leche League either. She’d bonded early to her ba-ba and, given the two other toddlers I was wrangling at the time, that suited me fine. But all three were the beneficiaries of the demand-feeding orthodoxy that had ruled supreme in the parenting literature ever since Dr. Spock.

Demand feeding—basically, fulfilling the nutritive needs of the child as they happen over the course of the day (and far into the night, as the case may be)—makes such intuitive sense that many new parents never think to question it. I certainly didn’t. Putting a baby on a schedule was something they did in the bad old days of the 1950s. It went along with smoking in pregnancy, or “airing” the baby in all weathers, as if it were a feather quilt. Four-hourly feeds were rigid and ridiculous, I would have told you at the time. A baby was a living, changing organism—not some kind of automaton. (Never mind that I’d been raised that way myself without obvious mechanical damage.)

I’m not saying that demand feeding isn’t a good practice. What I am saying is that no one ever told you when it should stop.

Anni was about twelve when I asked her, as I did most nights, if she was hungry for dinner yet. “Not really,” she admitted. “In fact, I’ve
never
actually been hungry.”

Eighteen years after commencing lactation, I was forced to admit that my kids were still being demand-fed—though they called it “grazing” now that they’d gotten as big as horned ruminants. It was a pattern I’d been aware of for some time. But The Experiment revealed something about it that I’d never considered before: It wasn’t only my direct failure to take a hard line on four-hourly feeds (aka breakfast, lunch, and dinner) that was to blame. It was also the way we’d structured our media ecology ... or, more accurately, the way we’d failed to structure it.

As sunflowers turn to the light, our family’s primary attention had turned toward our screens over recent years. Over roughly the same period of time, the social function of family meals had pretty much crumbled. Coincidence? The more I thought about it, the more I thought not. It’s true, we had always been a demand-fed family. But once upon a time we had also been a family that sat down to meals together, around a table, in a technology-free space—aka the kitchen—that was the functional, beating heart of our home. In recent years, we’d undergone a bypass, big-time. People had started to grab a bite where they could: at their, quote-unquote, workstations (where 95 percent of their time was spent slacking), or on the way to school, or training, or social events.

My friend Susan, who grew up on a sheep station in New South Wales, used to wonder why people didn’t just eat pellets, like livestock. Watching my kids graze, I often wondered the same thing myself. We didn’t “dine” anymore: We fueled.

I see now that I was part of the problem—a really big part, it pains me to admit. Sure, their lives had gotten busier (or so they kept telling me). But mine had too (or so I kept telling myself). Sitting down to meals was a luxury that working families like ours couldn’t afford. Everybody knew that. There simply wasn’t time to squander on sit-down home-cooked meals, like some sepia-toned tableau from the golden age of grade-B television. I wasn’t entirely pleased to see the collection of cereal bowls and teacups littering the backseat of our car most mornings—or to hear the crash of crockery and the clatter of coffee spoons each time we went over a speed hump—but I accepted it as part of the deal of having teenagers.

As primary-school kids, they’d pulled
me
out of bed in the morning. Now I find that extraordinary. (One day in the not-too-distant future, perhaps when they are changing my diaper, I may see things differently.) Back then, cooking breakfast—eggs and toast, oatmeal, French toast, and fruit—and sitting down together to eat it was the easy part of the day. Now it seemed to take every ounce of my maternal energy just to prize them from their lairs. I’d become a human snooze button, going off at regular intervals. By the time I simply started yelling—about five minutes before blast-off—a smash-and-grab approach to the Most Important Meal of the Day was the best anybody could hope for. I’d facilitate, grouchily—thrusting hastily made peanut-butter sandwiches into people’s backpacks as they lurched past, or sloshing three travel thermoses of tea in the general direction of the car.

At dinnertime, I still tried hard to bring all the stakeholders to the table. Sometimes, against the odds, I succeeded. But between Bill’s water-polo schedule, Anni’s social schedule, and everybody’s repeated pleadings for “chill-out time”—a thinly veiled euphemism for sitting, trancelike, before their respective screens—achieving a quorum had become a rarity. And even when I succeeded in corralling them to the table, my best diplomacy failed to keep them there. Most nights, Bill would be washing down the last bite of his dinner with a third glass of milk by the time I picked up my fork. “Thanks, Mum!” he’d call cheerfully as he dumped his plate in the sink and turned fervently once more toward Mecca (as I’d begun to think of The Beast). He’d sit back down if I insisted, of course. But forcing a boy to be sociable is a bit like teaching a pug to break-dance. The quality of result simply isn’t worth the bother.

“So, how is school?” I’d ask.

“Good,” he’d say.

“What are you reading in English at the moment?” I’d ask.

“Books,” he’d say.

“Any book in particular?” I’d ask.

“Not really,” he’d say. “Can I go now?”

The girls didn’t eat quite as fast, but they, too, tended to react robotically to my crude attempts at conversation. It was almost as if we’d corporately become one of those joyless married couples you see at restaurants, eating purposefully and in total silence. Together in flesh but on entirely separate hemispheres of the spirit. “Other families eat dinner in front of the TV,” Sussy would sometimes remind me wistfully.

They weren’t the only ones without an appetite for all this. Personally, I’d have preferred to read my novel most nights too, though admitting that even to myself made me feel guilty and wrong. You know, normal. I’d banned the girls from texting at the table—indeed, had never allowed it—but most nights I could feel their attention being tugged by their absent media, like a spider sensing a fly at the far edge of its web. They were, all three, so clearly tolerating our time together. It was as if our kitchen had become a transit lounge, an uncongenial place of temporary detention; a pit stop separating them from the virtual places they would much rather be.

The demand-feeding thing was the brittle icing on an already stale cake. And the evidence lay strewn near every monitor: wrappers, crusts, crumpled cans and cups, fruit peel, the petrifying remains of instant noodles, cookie crumbs, half-empty (never half-full) water bottles, and the occasional Pollockesque glob of gum. The low-level gratification of binge snacking was clearly the perfect accompaniment to the low-level gratification of binge connectivity. Except that “binge” wasn’t really the right metaphor, implying as it did a time of abstinence or purging. More accurately, the children were on a sort of dual IV drip: data through one tube, Doritos through another.

Everybody knows that food fuels activity. But as new mothers learn the hard way, the connection between food and rest is equally direct and every bit as dynamic. A hungry baby will not sleep, a sleepy baby will not feed. A baby who sips through the day and cat-naps through the night may be healthy enough, but is rarely robustly happy. It’s not just his moods that are short. His attention span is too. This is why a child whose feeding-waking cycle is messed about, or never given the chance to establish itself in the first place, will be a child who struggles to settle down to bigger things, whether playing peek-a-boo or learning to parallel park.

The connection between eating ravenously, sleeping deeply, and concentrating in a focused and sustained way—whether on work or at play—is so obvious when our kids are babies. We spend half our lives as parents shoring up those boundaries, keeping to the routines that we know will help our children to thrive. We are happy to let our own lives descend into blurriness for a while, missing sleep and meals and sex and the sustaining goodness of uninterrupted work, to ensure that
their
lives have clipped edges and crisp demarcations. But it’s not just babies who do best under conditions of clarity. We all do. Teenagers, arguably, more than most.

Watching my kids get swallowed up into the maw of multitasking, I observed the onset of a condition I came to think of as “blobbiness.” It was
not
next to godliness.

I’d made quite a study of blobbiness over the past two to three years, and it seemed to me its symptomatology—personal untidiness, poor eating habits, disordered sleep-wake patterns, ineffective time management, ineffective “stuff” management (losing personal items, forgetting to take lunch, losing track of money) and mood changes positively free-associative in their movements to and fro—was all about boundaries or, more precisely, about not having any. If I were a physicist, I’d use the term “entropy” instead of blobbiness: the tendency of a system to move toward randomness, loss of heat, and decreasing differentiation of parts.

The parents of teenagers tend to employ another word for all this: normal. This is what adolescence is all about, we tell ourselves and each other. The popular media support us in this view, reminding us constantly that teen brains are different, that we should not expect “adult” (read: responsible) behaviors from them before the age of twenty-eight or even thirty-two, that teenagers have “always” been messy, lazy, clueless layabouts.

In fact, most of the symptoms of adolescence—and we do treat it as a disorder—are nowhere to be found in many other cultures or in earlier historical periods. The tendency of young people to fall in love or lust and to behave from time to time with a certain impetuosity (i.e., like bloody idiots)—these are universals, it seems. But the rest of it is acquired behavior, the consequence of greater leisure, greater affluence, a prolonged period of schooling—and our correspondingly lowered expectations that our teens will contribute productively to family or community. The more childish and irresponsible behavior we accept from them—because that’s the way they “are”—the more childish and irresponsible they have become. Truly, they are only following orders.

And it is important to grasp that those orders are coming from our culture as a whole. They are what sociologists call a “social script” or a “social construction.” Your, quote-unquote, parenting philosophy, or mine, is not primarily a work of your imagination or will or wisdom, although hopefully all these make an appearance at some point. It’s not like a craft project that you design and complete in your spare time, although—again—we are encouraged to think of parenting this way. In ways that are terribly important, we actually do get handed a set of Operating Instructions (albeit encoded at a very high level of abstraction) at our kids’ births. The instructions don’t tell us what to do at every step along the way. But they do tell us what the basic game plan is, and what object we are aiming for. They key our expectations for achieving—or enduring—what we have learned to call “developmental milestones.”

The climate change we have witnessed in the global media ecology over the past fifteen years hasn’t created the blobbiness we observe in our kids. But it has certainly intensified it, and in some ways legitimized it, pushing our children to the next blobbiness level. The explosion in connectivity (if not always in communication) that has enabled the 24/7 lifestyle to which our Digital Natives incline has detonated a whole new set of land mines, reducing an already besieged set of personal and social boundaries to tatters. Blobbiness is no longer a stage—a difficult phase to be tolerated until it “passes through,” like a storm, or a kidney stone. In the present media ecology, blobbiness is not exceptional in the least. On the contrary, it rules.