The Winter of Our Disconnect (3 page)

If it hadn’t been for Thoreau—or, more accurately, Sherman Paul, who wrote the introduction to my well-thumbed Riverside edition—I would probably have put away the idea with the rest of my hare-brained maternal schemes.
^a
It was Paul’s succinct explanation of why Thoreau took to the woods in the first place that was the tipping point. “He had reduced the means of life,” Paul had written, “not because he wanted to prove he could go without them, or to disclaim their value in enriching life, but because they were usually factitious—they robbed one of life itself.”

Thoreau’s inspired mania for simplifying life, in other words, was just like Michelangelo’s gift for “simplifying” a chunk of stone: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” It was an act of creation and courage—not destruction, not fear. By isolating himself at Walden Pond, Thoreau hadn’t run away from life. He’d run toward it. Why couldn’t we leave our lives of quiet, digital desperation and do the same?

Now that I’d done the reframe—it wasn’t something I’d be doing
to
my family, it was something I’d be doing
for
them!—I couldn’t wait to begin. There was only one thing stopping me.

Oh, all right. Three things.

 

 

Anni, Bill, and Sussy, like most teenagers, live in a pre-Copernican universe. They are convinced the sun revolves around them. As their mother, I have done little to challenge this view. So when I finally worked up the courage to spring The Experiment on them for real, I chose my moment carefully. The stakeholders would need to be in a good mood. There would need to be lots of distractions: lights, music, refined sugar, whatever it took. And there would need to be witnesses.

Gracetown, Western Australia—go on, Google it—is a remote and ridiculously tiny coastal community on the southwest coast of Australia. It is renowned for its jaw-dropping Indian Ocean beaches, fearsome surf breaks, and curious lack of normal utilities. Gracetown is “electrified,” but has no municipal water or gas supply—each house has its own rainwater tank and gas bottles—and no cell phone or Internet coverage. A persistent teenager climbing to the cliffside community’s highest peak might get reception for a minute or two—and of course
all
teenagers are persistent—but that aside, we’re talking Walden Pond with an Aussie accent.

So choosing to spend Christmas at Gracetown with our BFF (Best Friend Family) the Revells wasn’t exactly a coincidence.

We’d arrived a few days early to settle into the rhythm. I’d insisted that everybody pack light, even the girls. It was one roll-on trunk of hair products each, I told them sternly, and no exceptions. And when Bill asked me if I’d seen his Nintendo DS, I thought, okay, this is my moment. I took a deep breath, looked him in the eye ... and lied. I said I had no idea where it was. I had, in fact, hidden it at the bottom of a box of disused printer drivers the previous night, may the Good Lord have mercy upon my soul. “Let’s read books in the car, honey,” I suggested brightly. He muttered something under his breath. It was either “sick” or “suck,” and I was pretty sure I knew which. In the end, I hauled out the iTrip, and we listened to podcasts on the three-hour car journey south—
This American Life
(my favorite radio show on any hemisphere),
The Hamish and Andy Show
,
The Moth.
Just being in a small space, listening to the same medium, made it feel like an old-fashioned family holiday already. But in a good way, in a good way.

Maybe I’d choked on the Nintendo thing, but the car trip had renewed my courage. Gracetown was the perfect setting in which to do the deed, even down to its name, with its faintly fundamentalist-slash-Elvis-impersonator overtones. It was just a case of choosing my moment. Christmas Day was only a few days hence, I reflected Grinchishly. Why not lower the boom then?

My dark thoughts about going off the grid dated as far back as Anni’s four-year-old fixation with a certain
Lady Lovely Locks
video, featuring characters with names such as “ShiningGlory” and “Furball,” and fiercely hair-driven plotlines. At the same time, like every other parent of toddlers, I was grateful for the thirty-minute break. (Bill’s first sentence, which he bellowed solemnly at 5:15 every morning, was “Watch
White
!”—as in “The name’s White.
Snow
White.”) Yet as the years—and the technology—flew by, I rarely got beyond the grumbling stage. Occasionally I’d announce dramatically that I was “pulling the plug” so that everybody could read a book, or play a game, or just bicker with one another the old-fashioned way: face-to-face. Sometimes I’d even make good on it. “But I was doing my homework!” they’d wail, as the anime or the YouTube video or the MSN conversation froze midframe, exactly as if an evil fairy had waved her wand of doom. It felt good to pretend I still had some power in my own home. Deep down, though, even I—a woman so out of touch I still referred to “taping” shows on TV, as if they were packing boxes, or sprained ankles—was aware that ripping the modem out of the wall once every three or four weeks was a case of spitting into the Zeitgeist.

Who can ever say for certain what makes a person finally take that crucial leap into a life-changing decision? In my own case, I suspect The Experiment had roots as long and tangled as my fourteen-year-old’s hair extensions. They probably went back to my graduate work in media ecology at New York University, my fascination with transcendentalist thinkers like Thoreau and Emerson, and my move to Australia in the late eighties.

There were more proximate causes too. One was an interview I did for one of my podcasts with a family of six kids, ranging in age from two to twelve, who were growing up entirely screen-free. Naturally I’d expected cult involvement, or at the very least a full-time parent-at-home. But no. Both parents worked as real-estate agents. There was no evidence of an extraterrestrial link. And the kids were amazing—full of excitement and ideas and trouvé collections and craft projects. Not fussy, adult-designed ones made from kits, but the kind you make from dead leaves and macaroni and toilet-paper rolls. They had a fort in the woods, and a tree swing, and a big dress-up box full of old clothes. “Don’t you guys ever get bored?” I asked toward the end of the interview, almost desperate to find an edge to the story. But I already knew what the answer would be: a resounding “Nup.” These kids knew they were a bit unusual, but they didn’t feel deprived, if they thought about it at all—which, until the arrival of a woman with a microphone, I’m not sure they had. After all, their compensation for living without media was, to borrow Sherman Paul’s phrase, nothing less than “life itself.”

When I think it through, I realize there was all this backstory to my own decision. But reduce it to a sound bite and it was simply this: I was worried about my kids. About how they were using their time, and their space, and their minds. That’s the center of gravity that pulled the whole thing together ... and it’s also, maybe, where my somewhat offbeat and bizarre life story crosses your own.

So, when I lowered the boom amid the happy detritus of a normal Australian Christmas morning—for chestnuts roasting on an open fire, substitute bacon and eggs on the barbie and the intoxicating whiff of 30+ sunscreen—there was nothing impulsive about it. Why I was making this decision was pretty clear in my mind. How I was going to obtain buy-in was a total blur. Granted, I do have kind of a gift for the pitch. In another, more lucrative life I would have made a bang-up used-car salesman. My enthusiasms—of which I have many—are as infectious as swine flu. My kids could tell you stories. Like the time I came home, flung open the door, and announced gleefully, “Hey, kids! Guess what?! I’ve lost my license for three whole months! Isn’t it great? Because we are going to have
such
fun learning all about public transportation!” (It was just a few speeding fines. And not big ones either, until you added them all together. “Where I learned to drive—on the Long Island Expressway—anybody who
doesn’t
go ten miles an hour over the speed limit is a pussy,” I tried explaining to the constable. LOL he did not.)

I did such a consummate smoke-and-mirrors number when my marriage broke up that my eldest, who was four, literally didn’t notice. “Where’s Dada, anyway?” she finally inquired several weeks later. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? He’s got a cool new house and lucky you will get to stay there sometimes, just like Karen Brewer!” (Oh, for the days when a well-placed allusion to
The Baby-Sitters Club
was all it took to save one’s sorry maternal ass!)

I don’t lie, ever. Hardly. I sell. (“That’s not a ‘vegetable,’ Bill. Why, that’s a mouthwatering side dish of tender, buttery baby beans!”) But let’s face it: Spinning slightly overripe bananas to your toddlers is one thing—yes, I’ve been known to sing the Chiquita Banana song, and fake tap-dance too, if that’s what it took. Selling your teenagers on the concept of giving up their information and entertainment lifelines for six months is quite another. To be honest, it kind of made giving birth in a manger in Bethlehem look like level-one Tetris.

Part of my strategy revolved around the presence of friendly witnesses: Mary and Grant and their teenage daughters, Ches and Torrie. Our fellow holiday-makers and oldest family friends would support me, and their presence would prevent any attempted worm-outs. It was Mary who unexpectedly fed me my cue that morning, as she watched the girls unwrap their main presents—obscenely overpriced appliances hyped as “the Rolls-Royce of hair straighteners” (Lady Lovely Locks, may you rot in hell).

“But Suse,” Mary blurted out. “Will they be able to use those when The Experiment starts?”

I shot her a look that could depilate, but it was too late. Everyone had heard her.

“Kids, I have an announcement to make,” I began. All rustling of wrapping paper and gnawing of candy canes ceased. The girls put down their straighteners. Bill popped the lid back on his Sex Wax (a hair product, essentially, for surfboards). Even Rupert looked up with a mixture of anxiety and apprehension. But then he’s a pug. He always looks like that. I took a deep breath and I hit them with it.

I didn’t talk about being worried about their well-being, or their school performance, or their sleeping habits, or my fears for the arrested development of their social, intellectual, or spiritual skills. That would have been too much like nagging. It would have put them on the defensive. It would have started a conversation, and a conversation, frankly, was the last thing I wanted. The important thing was to announce, not to “suggest” or, heaven forbid, “discuss.”

I concluded my announcement, eyes ablaze with missionary zeal (also fear), “It’s an experiment in living. We are all going to do it together, as a family. And it’s going to change our lives.” There was a frozen pause. If life was a MacBook, this was our spinning color wheel of death.

Sussy broke the silence.

“You mean ... like
Wife Swap
?” she asked.

“YES!” I roared. Bless the baby for throwing me a life raft. “Exactly like reality TV! Exactly! Except, of course, we won’t have a TV ...” I trailed off. I could see Bill and Anni exchange glances.

“What about homework?” Bill asked cannily.

“You can do it at the library, or at a friend’s house, or at home using ...”

“What? A stone tablet and a chisel?” Anni snapped.

“If you like,” I replied evenly. (Pretending I don’t get it is kind of my genius as a parent.) “But the point is, I can’t control the universe. Alas. So it’s only our
home
that’s going to be screen-free.”

I’d thought about this one a lot. In a perfect world—i.e., in which I did control the universe—The Experiment would be a
total
disconnect: no electronic media, at all, full stop, anywhere. It pained me to accept the reality that not even I could orchestrate such a thing. Short of moving to Djibouti, or imprisoning everybody in a backyard bomb shelter, there was no way I could pull it off. Like every other parent in the universe, I’d just have to find the serenity to accept the things I couldn’t change, the courage to change the things I could, and sufficient download speed to tell the difference.

While they were still digesting the shred of good news I’d thrown at them, I added I’d be writing a book about our adventure. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Anni interrupted. “A book? Like for money?”

“Maybe. Eventually,” I allowed.

“Well, what do
we
get out of it?”

I winced. It was ugly, but I was ready. I knew that sooner or later we’d get around to talking turkey. As the eldest, and most practiced, plea-bargainer, Anni’d had plenty of experience in brokering damages claims on behalf of her plaintiffs. I could have quoted Thoreau. I could have explained the thing about Michelangelo, or produced a recommended reading list in media, cognition, and learning. Instead, Reader, I cash-incentivized them.

“Play along and play fair,” I muttered, “and, yes, there’ll be something in it for everybody.” I sounded like a mafia boss. But
madre di dio
, I have three teenagers. What else am I supposed to sound like?

 

 

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, they say. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my fourteen years of being a single parent, it’s that a surprise attack—a pudding in the face, as it were—can be your best offensive strategy. I know that makes it sound as though you and your children are on opposing armies or something, but ... well, aren’t you? Boundary setting can be so hard, especially if, like me, you are secretly just a little intimidated by people who are more powerful, better looking, and wealthier than you are. Sure, they’re your kids and you love them. But they can still be pretty scary.

That may be stating the case a little strongly. But as far as I can see, most parents of my generation—from the tail end of the Baby Boomers to the tender tip of Gen X—don’t really rule the roost. We sort of scratch around it apologetically, seeking consensus.