Hi Patricia,It's been a hard week of emotion, mostly based on age. This has burned me from both ends.
First, Elsa is starting kindergarten. Where did that time go? She was just being carried around in a carseat and perfectly happy giggling at those stupid pull-toys that vibrate as they retract. I had been funny then. Now, the rigamarole of playdates and preparatory potlucks has left me withered. At one, she was following along on the monkey bars because she saw her future classmates doing it. Totally covered three quarters of the distance before plummeting, walloping flat on her rump, and needing me to comfort her. WHERE WILL I BE DURING SCHOOL HOURS?!!
(Let's be honest: drinking.)
From the other end, also proving that I'm old, this week is the twentieth anniversary of two important things. The release of Natural Born Killers and the release of Dinosaur Jr.'s Without a Sound. I'm not the biggest Dinosaur Jr. fan, but when I Feel The Pain comes on the radio, it is a straight shot of teenage angst into my carotid. And, if you recall, at this point in 1994 we were about six months into Tori Amos, three months into Weezer's Blue Album, and withering under the advances of Beck, Hole, and Green Day. WTF?!?
But movies. Holy shit. Those are wrapped around my brain. You have to understand that 1994 was a mindbending summer for me. Besides Natural Born Killers, it was the summer of Pulp Fiction, The Crow, and The Professional. Part of it was the neurological mind-fuck that was involved in each of the soundtracks. (I still have playlists with Cowboy Junkies, Jesus and Mary Chain, and Dusty Springfield because of these movies.) But the films themselves. The method of story telling. The bending of time. Young Natalie Portman. Cross country crime sprees. BANANA SLUGS. What kind of full-blown shotgun blast was that? My id has yet to recover. In 1994, I truly lived within a glass case of emotion.
And it was only for three months. Summer, it's the shit.
What I'm struggling with is myopia. How defining these things were in my life! How much they changed me as a person! How little time I actually spent on any one of them when there were hundreds of other things that, if I spent my time thinking about, actually built me into the person I am today!
WHUT? Yup. I'm not thinking about the hours I spent in a kitchen learning to cook. I'm not thinking about the days I spent in class trying to program a formula for genetic drift into my TI-85 (yes: cheating). I am thinking about a handful of shit that got slung up on the interwebs to "remind" me about what I've got in my past.
And I am thinking about running across these stupid things on Facebook talking about what "my curfew" used to be.
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| I guarantee that 90% of folks that posted this are lying. Only because the HOAs running their developments never popped for the streetlights. Also, you never had any friends and you're still stupid for not wearing a helmet. |
Hand sanitizer? Invented in 1988. Online? Should we point out that CERN set up the public World Wide Web in 1993? I know my first email was in 1995. Do I even need to suggest that this kind of bullshit viral nonsense wouldn't have been able to be disseminated prior to Facebook's launch in 2004? It's a bunch of stuff cherry picked to separate twenty-somethings and younger from those who might feel a light tear roll down their drying wrinkling cheeks remembering a misty time long ago. A time with roving bands of baseball garbed thugs and leaded gasoline.
On the surface, this bullshit sets up an expectation that there is some disconnect between childhood and technology. As someone who spent my childhood playing Super Nintendo, I can say the disconnect is nonexistent. On a deeper level, this crap is laced with all kinds of racial and ethnic privilege. And it sets this hierarchy of what it means to have had a true childhood. A sincere childhood.
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| And we know how that turned out. |
It's dangerous for the kids because childhood is a hell of a lot longer than anyone remembers. Lunatics posting this "no playdates" stuff or this "come in when the lights come on" stuff forget how many phases children go through. They focus on one point, that moment of freedom when you get to visit friends without parents. And they forget how many years of crazy helicopter parenting went into establishing the trust to get there.
It's also dangerous for us parents because we run the risk of looking and sounding and being obsolete in a time when that is the worst crime imaginable. To hide in some nostalgic world of faux Americana is to accelerate how quickly your kids stop listening to you. Given my position in the deep dip of the population pyramid, I want my kids thinking well of me.
I opened by talking about Elsa. She's about to start elementary school and Anna is in pre-K right behind her. Bullshit like this "curfew" stuff is not about improving the lives of today's children. It's about making a small set of old people feel superior about their childhood. My goal is to raise my kids today, not in some faint ghost of yesteryear.
So my question to you is how to do that.
Cheers,
Ray
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hi Ray,
There’s a sound I often hear when I am in my
bedroom and is the house is quiet. Usually in the mornings or late at night.
It’s like a scratching at the wall, but… rounder sounding; not sharp and pointy
like claws or something menacing. It’s fast and urgent – a uniform rhythm with
occasional flourishes and pauses. It took me a while to figure out what it was
when it first began, years ago. It’s my son, The Artist, creating art. His
bedroom and mine share a common wall – the wall onto which he tapes large
projects he’s working on.
I’ve been lying here this morning, listening
to The Artist create his latest potential masterpiece in the next room, getting
a little wistful and nostalgic. What has become of my adorable little muppet
who would come home from school and chat excitedly with me for an hour about the
cascading ideas in his head? I’ve always loved the way his mind works – like a
chain reaction of fireworks exploding as one concept or idea leads to the next.
I marvel at the connections he makes between disparate information. An artist’s
perspective on political systems and economics, music and popular culture. And
beauty. Young men don’t often talk about beauty like it’s something sacred and
essential, one of those things that make life spring forth from mere existence.
My muppet is a man now - tall and handsome,
serious and driven to make great art. And he does. His skill has always seemed
like magic. To me, one who cannot draw images that bring to mind in any way the
subject I am trying to render, anyone who can put pen to paper and make easily
recognizable representations of people and things may as well be conjuring
spirits with mumbled incantations. It’s witchcraft. The Artist graduated from
parlor-trick-level drawing ages ago, though. His art does so much more than
just mirror something he sees in real life. His compositions are rich and
complex, dark and beautiful and containing layers of messages from his
perspective and worldview. He is, as
objectively as I can evaluate his work, exceptionally talented.
Forgive me the meandering preamble. Like so
many normal, day-to-day things that occur, the scratching sound on my wall
reminds me that there will soon be no scratching on the wall. The
Artist turns 18 in a few months. Shortly after that, he will leave to college
and begin a life where I do not see him every day. I won’t sit next to him at
the dinner table and try to get him to tell me about his day, pulling-teeth
style. He won’t bound up the stairs, enthusiastically asking if I want to come
down and listen to the latest song he has recorded or look at the piece of
digital fine art he has created on his computer. Dinner plates will be set for 3, not 4. I know it’s the most natural thing in
the world, but I still kind of dread it. I am so proud of him and happy that
he’ll be off experiencing what was, for me, one of the best stages of life. But
I will miss him dearly.
This all brings me to the first subject of
your initial message: I feel ya, buddy. I, too, am old.
I totally relate to the ‘where’d the time go’
business. Even though I didn’t acquire my kids until they were well past
giggling at colorful pull toys, I’m still in a little bit of shock at their utter
teenagerness. We’ve been together since my eldest had just breached double
digits and his sister had just stopped counting her age on one hand. When did
they turn into a man and a young woman? I thought
I was paying pretty close attention.
I reckon that here is the place where I
should extol the joys of parenthood and admonish you to cherish every precious
moment or something. But (1) You’ve been a parent approximately the same length
of time I have (mine just started out older) and, thus (2) You’ve been a dad
long enough to know that every precious moment bit is some serious bullshit. Sure,
in the Buddhist sense, each moment of every life is a sacred and precious gift.
But in a less spiritual sense, you’d have to be a lunatic to cherish every second with your kids merely
because they will never again be that exact age at that exact moment.
Sometimes kids are amazing pains in the ass.
Sometimes the fact that their needs outweigh yours because you’re the grown up
is a major drag – like when you have an intestinal virus and they just threw up
on the carpet… or wet the bed… or saw a spider… or want a juice box. Those are
usually not the most cherishable moments. But you’ll remember enough of them,
just like you’ll remember the hugs and the inedible breakfasts in bed and glorious
afternoons of Princess Trek. It really does all go by at Warp Five, but somehow
in the process, their childhoods become scrimshawed on your bones. Moments,
good and bad, etched permanently inside you by the sheer power of your love for
them.
I should mention to our dear readers, by the
way, that you sent me your initial volley way back in August. You lamented the
imminent beginning of kindergarten and pondered what you would do with your
free time. Since it’s taken me nearly 3 months to reply, now you should know
the answers to some of your burning questions. What’s it like? Are the bars
actually open at the hour you drop Elsa off? What DO you do with your free
time? I suspect you don’t actually have any. You do still have Anna to
entertain while Elsa’s at school, right?
Regarding the next subject of your opening
post, nostalgia-induced myopia, I think we are largely in accord despite our
age difference. My first thought whenever you or your age-peers say something
to me referring to “our generation,” is that you’re being polite or kind. I
actually looked it up, though, and despite the 7 years I have on you, we are
still both firmly Generation X. Nonetheless,
those 7 years were a lot bigger a gap in 1994 than they are now. In 1994, you
were in high school. I was married to my first husband and booking punk bands
at dive bars and performance spaces for “a living.” Or maybe I’d already
switched over to publishing the environmental action newsletter. I know I’d
have been graduated from undergrad already had I taken a less circuitous route
through post-secondary education. Either way, I was busy pretending to be a
grown-up. Pulp Fiction, The Crow, and The Professional absolutely had
an impact on me, but not to the same magnitude. Sure, I was young enough to
find the notion of Mickey and Mallorying (or Pumpkin and Honey Bunnying) across
the country nihilistically romantic, but not so young as to have the insertion
of such images into my still-developing brain make as indelible an impression
as it did on you. (Those Tarantino flicks were rated R for a reason, young
man!)
I think that nostalgia, whatever the subject, is wrought
with the perils of myopia. It’s like when people wax philosophic about the 50’s
and what a simpler, safer, better time it was. Well, sure. For some (white,
middle class, male) people, the 50’s were gosh darn swell. Not so much for
black folks. Or homosexuals. Or women. Or soldiers fighting in Korea. Or people
suspected of Communism. All those people may look back on that era a little
less romantically. Those who yearn for those simpler days are blocking out a
lot of stuff that has improved since then. The same goes for those who hold up
being a kid prior to the early 80s as some kind of ideal.
I was one of those very lucky kids who got to
drink right from the garden hose (ew) and ride my bike, helmetless, until the
streetlights came on. And then when I came in for that dinner my mom made, I
ate vegetables that had been treated with DDT as a pesticide, beef that had
been injected with steroidal hormones for faster growth, and chicken that beenfed arsenic to improve pigmentation. My parents weren’t bad; this was just the
food that was available. My mom, like most moms back in the day, also smoked
cigarettes while she was pregnant with me. Folks just didn’t have the
information then that we have now. With the benefit of increased knowledge
about the food we eat and its effects on our bodies, I choose to feed my kids
organically grown, pesticide-free vegetables; certified hormone-free milk; and
eggs from free range, cage-free, non-antibiotic-treated, grain-fed chickens. I
know that not everyone is afforded the same options in the selection of their
groceries or has the ability to prioritize cleaner food with the demands of
limited resources. I do not do so without certain sacrifices in other areas of
my budget. But I think it’s worth it.
Mock me, if you must.
As for the technology bit, I am kinda torn.
In my home, I have more devices than people. I love technology and the instant access to information, people, and
entertainment it provides. However, I do fear that a lot of people now seem to
be more focused on memorializing experiences on Instagram and Tumblr and
FaceBook, etc than they are on actually experiencing
the experience. I worry that people will lose the ability to just sit and be
pensive (or even bored) because it’s so easy to indulge the strong preference
for externally-provided stimuli for entertainment and engagement. My kids don’t have phones, but I fear
that once we cave and get them for them, I will never again see their eyes –
just the tops of their heads while they are texting or playing Flappy Birds or
whatever is en vogue.
But that’s where parenting comes in, right?
It is essential in the modern age for young people to learn to use computers
and other devices – as early as is practicable, really – or they will be at a
disadvantage in relation to their peers. But we’re still the grown ups. We can limit their screen time, enforce
technology breaks, and force them to go outside and interact with other humans
in the sunshine. Technology is not
robbing our kids of “genuine” childhoods any more than the Krofft Superstars
after-school lineup robbed us of ours. We had HR Pufnstuf and Land of the Lost; they have Angry Birds and Snapchat. Everything is going to be just fine.
Best,
Patricia
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hi Patricia,
I like that idea. We will be just fine. Folks have always complained about the youth. And things have been going pretty well for a good long time.
The hard part is that the "damn kids today" complaint is coming from folks I grew up with. So many of them are people I listened to complain about their parents. We commiserated about how things should be different, and would be if we were in charge. I mean, we damn well promised that we'd never be Like That.
And now they're all Like That.
I guess what I lament is the missed opportunity to make things easier for those that come after us. It seems like such a waste to make them repeat the same crap that's currently keeping people fat, in debt, and depressed.
Of course, when someone says "make lives easier for our kids" people focus on precious little snowflake that can only use calculators or helicopter parents that shout down teachers to raise grades. "These kids lack character!" the grown ups say.
Well, I knew a lot of these grown ups when they lacked character too. And now they've confused their run through a useless gauntlet of meaningless tasks - school, apprenticeship, loans, boredom, climbing the corporate ladder, and commuting the DC Beltway - as somehow building character.
Now I'm laughing because I know two things. First, many of these folks are the same worthless assholes they've always been. Whatever form of character they attained really never helped them overall. Hate it when that realization takes so long to sink in.
Second, the world is passing them by, and they're scared.
But I suppose those are the two sides of the coin. For every youth told they aren't doing anything right, there's a grown-up that worries they have done it all wrong.
Cheers,
Ray
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