There are a few people in the world who believe that every fundamental aspect of who we are is decided by our genetics. There is another group who contend that such things are completely the result of influences from one’s social environs. All the rest of us fall somewhere in between. We recognize at some level that any argument of biology versus culture or “nature versus nurture” is a gross simplification of the complex interweaving of physiological capacity and social experience that is at work in the making of a human being.
The parents of young children repeatedly encounter instances where they must negotiate this interweaving in direct and immediate ways. When a child starts to talk depends on the development of muscle coordination within the lips and tongue and the exposure to sounds the child can mimic. When a child starts to walk depends on the development of muscle strength in legs, hips, back, and stomach and the availability of opportunities to safely practice getting up and moving around on two feet; When a child begins to eat solid foods depends upon the development of the proper gastric chemicals (and eventually teeth) in combination with cultural expectations about what constitutes appropriate nutrition for babies. When a child begins using the toilet depends on the development of the muscles necessary for bladder control and on parental choices regarding when and how to pursue toilet training.
In each of these cases, the opaqueness of how the biological and cultural influences intersect with each other created some uncertainty in exactly how I should handle them. However, as they are all skills that are basic functions of the human repertoire, I was able to approach them with the confidence that as long as I was patient both Pip and Polly would eventually get them.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of other practices, habits, and behaviors – both ones that I wish for Pip and Polly to acquire and ones that I wish they could lose - for which I have no such confidence. Saturday brought us one of the latter.
That evening, as I was preparing to put Polly and Pip into bed, Polly whacked her head against a chair. It was one of those dumb things that happen when we’re all tired and slightly off-kilter. She was standing on the floor and pulling a blanket up over her head when she stepped on the blanket and stumbled. Turning around as she fell, she crashed her head right into the seat of a big wooden rocking chair that occupies one corner of the kids’ room. The impact was solid enough to knock her head back and make her body go limp for just a moment as it slid to the floor.
After a moment of stunned silence, Polly started crying. Then Pip did, too. Actually, I think Pip, seeing what happened and anticipating Polly’s reaction, buried his head in his bedding and began wailing even before the tears started running down Polly’s face. He kept crying in a jerky and flailing fashion even as Ava took Polly out of the room and walked her around to comfort her. He only calmed down when Polly’s cries had dissipated. Then, seeing that she was no longer upset, he too smiled and asked me to wipe away the snot that was running down from his nose.
*****
Pip’s reaction to Polly’s distress was not unusual or unexpected. It is his normal pattern, one that has been in place since Polly was born two years ago. For the longest time, I have had trouble making sense of it because in the moment it feels very manipulative – Polly cries and gets lots of attention so Pip then cries to recapture some of that attention for himself. But in facing this situation over and over again, I have come to wonder how much control over this reaction he really has.
My uncertainty derives from two points.
First, Pip’s reaction to another’s tears is not limited to Polly. When he first started swim lessons, he was in a class with other kids who had never been in a swimming pool before. Two of these kids were terrified of being in the water, screaming and crying while the swim instructor gently moved them around the pool. The other kids in the class watched these two with quiet nervousness, but Pip burst out in tears the moment either one of them made so much as a whimper. When I would go to comfort him and try to show him that the kids were okay, he would just repeat over and over in a desperate voice, “Why are they crying?”
Pip encountered a similar situation during his time in preschool. One of the other boys in his class experienced significant separation anxiety during the first couple of weeks. This anxiety would lead to prolonged crying episodes each morning when his parents’ dropped him off. Again, while the other kids in the class seemed unnerved by this behavior, Pip would break out into full on tears. All it took was for Pip to hear this other boy start to cry and he would instantly go from happy and excited to apprehensive and crying. The whole situation made those first weeks of preschool very difficult for all of us. Fortunately, the teachers and the boy’s parents worked to find activities that would ease that moment of separation and eventually they seemed to develop a pattern that got him – and, consequently, Pip - into the classroom without undue stress.
The second reason I wonder about how much control Pip can exercise over his reaction to the tears of others is the intensely visceral nature of his crying. When he loses it, it’s a full-body experience. The crying doesn’t ramp up. It just bursts out of him. His feet kick. His face goes into his hands. Everything else shuts down. Then, after its done, he’s right back to normal.
This burst seems driven by the same pattern of feelings that I experience whenever I am dealing with a crying child. For example, when I saw Polly start to fall, my stomach involuntarily tightened and my breathing stopped. As her head hit the chair and her body flopped backward, I felt myself grimace and heard an audible groan come up from inside me. After the impact, I felt a frantic rush of worry as the worst case scenarios flashed through my head. Then, I took a deep breath to release that tension and slow down the rush of adrenaline before I picked Polly up and simultaneously tried to calm her and evaluate her (she was fine).
What I think happens for Pip is that he goes through the same internal tightening and adrenaline release as I do, but at the moment that I take a deep breath, he breaks into tears. His body seems to overwhelm whatever control his mind is trying to exercise.
*****
At first, I was not very sympathetic to these outbursts as they usually place me in the difficult position of soothing two crying children instead of one. I would get frustrated with Pip because I needed his support in helping to calm Polly and instead his actions were just making her more upset. Over time my frustration with him in these moments has lessened. I have watched him over and over, and now I can see that the nature of his crying is very similar to what I experience when I crack from a buildup of tension, frustration, and exhaustion. When this happens to me, there is very little I can do about it. I have to let the tears come out because my body has decided that this is what it needs to do.
And all this crying feels very well be therapeutic. I have found that in the moments when I feel completely overwhelmed some crying helps clear away enough tension to make me functional again. It is a bit like vomiting when I feel nauseated; I don’t really want to do it, but I know that if I go ahead and let it happen it will make me feel better. Pip seems to be the same way. His moments of intense feeling pass quickly and are generally not followed by a period of brooding, sullenness, or morose behavior. Once he is done crying, he pops right back to being happy and energetic and usually starts laughing about all the snot that is now running out of his nose.
All of these dynamics complicate the question of what I should do with Pip in these moments when the emotions of others overwhelm him. There are basically four options, each with its own problematic elements:
- comfort him: This poses two problems. First, it is difficult to comfort both kids at once. Bringing them close together just intensifies the crying of each. Second, it reinforces the idea that crying is a guaranteed attention getting mechanism. I want both Polly and Pip to be able to cry when they are hurt or frustrated. But I also fear the power that crying gives them. I don’t want them to learn to use it as a tool of manipulation.
- tell him to stop: This is one of those unrealistic commands that people try but never works. Once the tears are flowing, you can’t order a person to stop crying, regardless of how nicely or harshly you phrase it.
- leave him alone/send him to a safe spot to work it out: This tactic is the one I tend to use. It has the advantage of separating the crying children and allowing Pip to continue crying for as long as he feels he needs to. It also avoids the extra attention dilemma that comes with the comforting tactic. However, in using this tactic it feels like I am abandoning Pip in a time of difficulty. I worry that by sending him away from me I may be undermining his trust and his willingness to come to me in future times of difficulty.
- teach him to head off the emotions before they start: I think this is the best option. Ava and I have worked with him to create ways of holding off the tears – like moving to a different room or saying a funny word. This has worked sometimes though it is difficult to tell whether the gradual decrease in crying incidents over time is the result of our tactical deployments, Pip’s physical and emotional maturation, or just fewer instances of crying by Polly. My biggest concern here is the stigmatization of crying that is implied in the process. How do we parse when it is okay to cry and when it is not?
Ultimately, what I am running up against is the fact that in all but a few, well-defined situations (e.g. funerals), public crying is not a socially acceptable practice. It makes people uncomfortable and marks the one who is crying as incapacitated or out of control. As such part of me wants to teach him never to cry except in strategically useful situations. And yet, there is something physiologically important in crying that I want Pip to be able to access. It not only provides a physical release of internal stress but in the process it also facilitates an acknowledgement of the emotional intensity of a moment. It took me thirty years to recognize that this acknowledgement is an important thing, that it helps generate the kind of positive attitude coming out of a problem moment that makes handling the next array of challenges much easier. I see no reason why he should have to follow the same pattern as me.
So for now, I am stuck in a dilemma. I want Pip to understand when he can cry and when I need him to hold it back. But the tools I have at my disposal are too crude to teach him the nuances of this pattern. Instead, Pip and I flail about in a haze of incomplete knowledge and incommunicable frustrations with one another. It is a failure that is all too human and one that we can never fully overcome. The best I am hoping for is to not do too much damage in the process.
Showing posts with label daily life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label daily life. Show all posts
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Shifting Tides
Since Christmastime, there has been change afoot within our household. I have felt it come to my attention gradually, like when the ocean tide reaches its lowest ebb and, even before the waves begin crawling up the beach again, you can sense a new flow of activity around you. Things that used to go in one direction, now seem inclined to follow another.
Polly and Pip have started truly playing with each other. Our world will never be the same.
*****
Two recent moments have brought this imminent change to my immediate attention.
First, the week after New Year’s Ava went back to work and Polly, Pip and I spent a couple of days engaged in the kind of undirected play that helps the kids ease back into the familiar patterns of life after all the excitement and unpredictability of the holidays. On Thursday morning this meant goofing around in Polly and Pip’s bedroom. For much of the morning Polly played amongst the blankets and pillows on Pip’s bed – alternately burying herself in them, hiding beneath them, pretending to sleep among them, and rolling around on top of them. Pip took this time to collect all the Cabbage Patch dolls and stuffed animals he could find into a pile at the foot of the bed and then proceeded to roll, slide, and fall into them in a number of creative ways. Every once in a while the two of them would take a break from their respective endeavors to perform a series of synchronized belly flops into the sky blue sheets that had become bunched up in the middle of the bed.
At about 11:30 I got up from my assigned spot along the fringes of all this commotion and went in to the kitchen to cook up the grilled cheese sandwiches we were going to each for lunch that day. Usually when I do this, Polly and Pip will play for a few moments longer and then make their way into the kitchen with me – Pip likes to find ways to ‘help’ me make lunch and Polly likes to beg for pinches of cheese from whatever pile I’m using to make the sandwiches. This time however, they stayed in the room. After about five minutes I stuck my head out of the kitchen doorway and around the corner towards their room to see what they were up to. It wasn’t anything new. They were just rolling around together in the middle of the bed and laughing about something. Figuring they were just finishing up, I slipped back into the kitchen and continued making the sandwiches.
Fifteen minutes later I was done, and they were still playing. I carried the sandwiches out to the dining room table and then headed back to their room. When I walked in, they were still situated in the middle of the bed, though now they were laying side by side in the rumpled sheets and blankets while looking up at me with big smiles. I’m still not sure what they were doing during those twenty minutes, but whatever it was they were reluctant to come out for lunch. They were having too much fun to be interested in food.
*****
The second moment that caught my attention happened last week. I was doing some dishes in the kitchen while Polly and Pip were playing in the living room. Earlier in the day I had pulled a long thin strip of wood paneling out from the basement for the kids to use as a ramp, and now the whoosh of matchbox cars, fire trucks, and LEGO vehicles repeatedly rolling down the incline and across the hardwood floors filled our apartment. In between one of the rounds, Polly’s voice came calling around the around the corner:
“Daddy, help.”
There was no urgency in her tone and I guessed that she probably needed some assistance with one of the LEGO figures she likes to play with. One of her favorite games is to pull the hats, helmets, and hair off of these figures, but sometimes she has trouble putting them back on. I called back to her that I’d be there in a minute and went back to washing the soap off the casserole dish in my hand.
As I turned off the water and set the dish on the drying rack, Polly called to me once again:
“Pip help Polly, Daddy.”
This was said with such casualness and nonchalance that I chuckled a little bit as I walked around to the living room to see what had taken place.
In the living room I found Pip setting up his fire truck for another run down the ramp and Polly, as I expected, fiddling with some LEGO figures on the floor near the base of the ramp. I smiled at Pip and told him thank you for helping Polly. Then I turned back into the kitchen to finish the last few dishes.
Standing back at the sink it struck me that while this was certainly not the first time Pip has helped Polly with something, it was the first time that such a scenario had played out in this way. Usually Pip would come running to tell me about Polly’s difficulty – either before or after helping her – in order to receive some positive attention from me for the help he did or was about to render. This time, I guess, helping Polly out generated enough of its own positive feedback that Pip did not feel the need or the desire to seek this out from Daddy. While this development came as a surprise to me, neither Polly nor Pip found it remarkable. It was such a natural act that they didn’t even look up when I first stuck my head out of the kitchen to tell Pip thank you.
*****
This changing flow in the patterns of our life is a bittersweet experience for me. On the one hand, it is very exciting to see Polly and Pip start to build a more substantial relationship with one another. Through actions like playing together in their room, helping each other work out different problems, and even just talking directly with one another during meals, they are engaging in the kinds of shared, everyday experiences that are fundamental to developing bonds of trust and understanding between them. They are learning what it means to share the world with another person and are beginning to discover the joys and compromises this entails.
Unfortunately, every ‘us’ needs a ‘them’ against which to define itself, an external other which demarcates the boundary where ‘us’ begins and ends. This means a slight change in identity for Ava and me. Up to this point, Ava and I have been in the middle of everything Polly and Pip have done. We have been playmates as well as parents. While this positionality is sometimes a burden, it has enabled us to really know our kids, to keep track of what they are up to, to understand how they are feeling, to anticipate what they are thinking. This arrangement is still largely intact, but Polly and Pip’s growing relationship has given me a glimpse of what is to come, of the time when being a parent most often will mean being on the outside looking in. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong about this exclusion, but it still makes me sad. I love the level of intimacy I have with the kids right now and hate to think of it drifting away into the realm of memory.
One of the very few universals in the world is that today will be different from yesterday and tomorrow will be different from today. In all this difference there is some gain and some loss. Parents feel this persistent state of change with particular acuteness as our children constantly develop new capacities and leave behind old patterns. Polly and Pip’s growing interest in one another is an exciting development for Ava and me, but I can’t help mixing this excitement with a splash of nostalgia. Their time as babies is coming quickly to the final curtain, and I will miss it when its gone.
Polly and Pip have started truly playing with each other. Our world will never be the same.
*****
Two recent moments have brought this imminent change to my immediate attention.
First, the week after New Year’s Ava went back to work and Polly, Pip and I spent a couple of days engaged in the kind of undirected play that helps the kids ease back into the familiar patterns of life after all the excitement and unpredictability of the holidays. On Thursday morning this meant goofing around in Polly and Pip’s bedroom. For much of the morning Polly played amongst the blankets and pillows on Pip’s bed – alternately burying herself in them, hiding beneath them, pretending to sleep among them, and rolling around on top of them. Pip took this time to collect all the Cabbage Patch dolls and stuffed animals he could find into a pile at the foot of the bed and then proceeded to roll, slide, and fall into them in a number of creative ways. Every once in a while the two of them would take a break from their respective endeavors to perform a series of synchronized belly flops into the sky blue sheets that had become bunched up in the middle of the bed.
At about 11:30 I got up from my assigned spot along the fringes of all this commotion and went in to the kitchen to cook up the grilled cheese sandwiches we were going to each for lunch that day. Usually when I do this, Polly and Pip will play for a few moments longer and then make their way into the kitchen with me – Pip likes to find ways to ‘help’ me make lunch and Polly likes to beg for pinches of cheese from whatever pile I’m using to make the sandwiches. This time however, they stayed in the room. After about five minutes I stuck my head out of the kitchen doorway and around the corner towards their room to see what they were up to. It wasn’t anything new. They were just rolling around together in the middle of the bed and laughing about something. Figuring they were just finishing up, I slipped back into the kitchen and continued making the sandwiches.
Fifteen minutes later I was done, and they were still playing. I carried the sandwiches out to the dining room table and then headed back to their room. When I walked in, they were still situated in the middle of the bed, though now they were laying side by side in the rumpled sheets and blankets while looking up at me with big smiles. I’m still not sure what they were doing during those twenty minutes, but whatever it was they were reluctant to come out for lunch. They were having too much fun to be interested in food.
*****
The second moment that caught my attention happened last week. I was doing some dishes in the kitchen while Polly and Pip were playing in the living room. Earlier in the day I had pulled a long thin strip of wood paneling out from the basement for the kids to use as a ramp, and now the whoosh of matchbox cars, fire trucks, and LEGO vehicles repeatedly rolling down the incline and across the hardwood floors filled our apartment. In between one of the rounds, Polly’s voice came calling around the around the corner:
“Daddy, help.”
There was no urgency in her tone and I guessed that she probably needed some assistance with one of the LEGO figures she likes to play with. One of her favorite games is to pull the hats, helmets, and hair off of these figures, but sometimes she has trouble putting them back on. I called back to her that I’d be there in a minute and went back to washing the soap off the casserole dish in my hand.
As I turned off the water and set the dish on the drying rack, Polly called to me once again:
“Pip help Polly, Daddy.”
This was said with such casualness and nonchalance that I chuckled a little bit as I walked around to the living room to see what had taken place.
In the living room I found Pip setting up his fire truck for another run down the ramp and Polly, as I expected, fiddling with some LEGO figures on the floor near the base of the ramp. I smiled at Pip and told him thank you for helping Polly. Then I turned back into the kitchen to finish the last few dishes.
Standing back at the sink it struck me that while this was certainly not the first time Pip has helped Polly with something, it was the first time that such a scenario had played out in this way. Usually Pip would come running to tell me about Polly’s difficulty – either before or after helping her – in order to receive some positive attention from me for the help he did or was about to render. This time, I guess, helping Polly out generated enough of its own positive feedback that Pip did not feel the need or the desire to seek this out from Daddy. While this development came as a surprise to me, neither Polly nor Pip found it remarkable. It was such a natural act that they didn’t even look up when I first stuck my head out of the kitchen to tell Pip thank you.
*****
This changing flow in the patterns of our life is a bittersweet experience for me. On the one hand, it is very exciting to see Polly and Pip start to build a more substantial relationship with one another. Through actions like playing together in their room, helping each other work out different problems, and even just talking directly with one another during meals, they are engaging in the kinds of shared, everyday experiences that are fundamental to developing bonds of trust and understanding between them. They are learning what it means to share the world with another person and are beginning to discover the joys and compromises this entails.
Unfortunately, every ‘us’ needs a ‘them’ against which to define itself, an external other which demarcates the boundary where ‘us’ begins and ends. This means a slight change in identity for Ava and me. Up to this point, Ava and I have been in the middle of everything Polly and Pip have done. We have been playmates as well as parents. While this positionality is sometimes a burden, it has enabled us to really know our kids, to keep track of what they are up to, to understand how they are feeling, to anticipate what they are thinking. This arrangement is still largely intact, but Polly and Pip’s growing relationship has given me a glimpse of what is to come, of the time when being a parent most often will mean being on the outside looking in. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong about this exclusion, but it still makes me sad. I love the level of intimacy I have with the kids right now and hate to think of it drifting away into the realm of memory.
One of the very few universals in the world is that today will be different from yesterday and tomorrow will be different from today. In all this difference there is some gain and some loss. Parents feel this persistent state of change with particular acuteness as our children constantly develop new capacities and leave behind old patterns. Polly and Pip’s growing interest in one another is an exciting development for Ava and me, but I can’t help mixing this excitement with a splash of nostalgia. Their time as babies is coming quickly to the final curtain, and I will miss it when its gone.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Inside the Bubble
“Ted Stevens died in a plane crash last month. Oh yeah, and Daniel Schorr died too.” Ava said this to me casually as we sat by a duck pond on Saturday morning feeding the kids a snack of raisins, crackers, and blueberry muffin bits. “I thought you might want to know.”
This is how I get my news these days, in little tidbits that slip out during moments of idle conversation. It’s how I learned about the BP oil spill, the final passage of healthcare legislation, the earthquake in Haiti, and just about anything else that has happened outside the confines of our new neighborhood. I effectively live in an information bubble. Partially a matter of circumstance and partially of my own making, the bubble is a powerful filter that keeps me largely ignorant of just about everything going on in the world right now: politics, the economy, technological developments, trends in popular culture, you name it. I can tell you astonishingly little about any of these things.
And I love it.
The bubble started forming with Pip’s birth. The TV went into a cabinet. The computer went on a shelf. They only emerged for a few minutes each night after he went to sleep. Following Polly’s birth, the increased demands on my attention gradually weaned me from a regular consumption of NPR and sports talk radio as well. Now, aside from an ongoing subscription to the Atlantic Monthly, almost all my information of the outside world comes from Ava.
In place of the global array of news and stories that I used to get from various sources, I have the intensely local experience that is caring for Pip and Polly. They provide me with such a focused, first-hand array of comedy, drama, excitement, suspense, heartwarming moments, achievements, and thrills that the second and third-hand accounts of the world that come in through the news media, Facebook, movies, and the like all feel hazy and very far away. For example, in the last twenty-four hours, Pip completed a thirty-piece puzzle of the world practically on his own, asked me to talk about car wrecks over and over (this became a physics lesson), gave Polly an actual and unprompted kiss on the cheek for the first time, and melted down into tears on at least four different occasions. For her part, Polly added the words ‘cat,’ ‘yellow,’ and ‘purple’ to her vocabulary, happily gobbled so much macaroni and cheese that I thought she would burst, pooped in the toilet for the first time, and subsequently decided to celebrate by waking up at 11:45 last night and refusing to go back to sleep until 2 AM. There is nothing that I can read or watch that will ever match all of this.
In the last month, I have had an extra chance to ruminate on the bubble. I have made two trips up to Cincinnati to check in on our house, mow the yard, and do some basic maintenance, and each time I spent the entire 90 minute journey north listening to NPR. It was like briefly visiting a place I used to live in. So much was familiar and comfortable: the voices, the music, the regular sequence of the news segments. But, as has been the case anytime I have returned somewhere after a long absence, I noticed two things that I hadn’t felt before.
The first is that with all the reports and updates and commentary and analysis, it’s difficult to tell on a daily basis what is signal and what is noise. I used to think that I could filter through all the incoming material and figure out what mattered and what didn’t. Now, after my return visit, I don’t think that’s possible. So much of what is important in any given news narrative is determined post facto. The stories I heard on my way up to Cincinnati may be critical or may be worthless. For example, did the large drop in the Dow Jones Index signal a bad turn for the economy or did it just make more room for it to pop back up? The odds are with the latter, but it all depends on what happens the next day. There is no way of knowing beforehand. If I want narratives that are efficiently meaningful, I’m better off with history books. The daily (or hourly or minute-by-minute) news is just a giant crapshoot.
And that leads me to the second thing. When I turned off the radio upon arriving in Cincinnati, I felt somewhat informed but mostly just primed with anticipation about what will happen in the coming hours and days. I wanted to listen to more news on the way back to Lexington to see how things had changed during the two hours I was away from the radio. Then I wanted to check back in the next day. It was a compulsion that while not overwhelming was significant enough to make me think, “Was I addicted to the news?”
Usually upon hearing the word ‘addiction’ I think of things like alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, etc. But the withdrawal process I went through after each trip to Cincinnati had all the patterns of a person coming off an addiction. It makes me wonder. I’ve always thought of addiction as something abhorent and outside the bounds of normality. But if something as simple as listening to the news creates this kind of attachment in me, maybe I need to reconfigure my understanding. What if the propensity to addiction is a fundamental property of being human and the only real differentiating factor is the value placed on the things you are addicted to? If I substitute the word ‘addiction’ for ‘habit,’ how does that change my view of the world? I guess these are questions for another time.
In the meantime, I know that there is a balance to be struck between the world and my kids, a certain meeting point to be found between global and local knowledges that would make me a more socially functional person. But right now I am really happy with my bubble. The kids have less than five years before we release them into the wilds of the public school system. It’s a limited time opportunity. So, I’ll take some global ignorance in exchange for a little extra sensitivity to the local details. There’ll be plenty of time to catch up on all that other news later.
This is how I get my news these days, in little tidbits that slip out during moments of idle conversation. It’s how I learned about the BP oil spill, the final passage of healthcare legislation, the earthquake in Haiti, and just about anything else that has happened outside the confines of our new neighborhood. I effectively live in an information bubble. Partially a matter of circumstance and partially of my own making, the bubble is a powerful filter that keeps me largely ignorant of just about everything going on in the world right now: politics, the economy, technological developments, trends in popular culture, you name it. I can tell you astonishingly little about any of these things.
And I love it.
The bubble started forming with Pip’s birth. The TV went into a cabinet. The computer went on a shelf. They only emerged for a few minutes each night after he went to sleep. Following Polly’s birth, the increased demands on my attention gradually weaned me from a regular consumption of NPR and sports talk radio as well. Now, aside from an ongoing subscription to the Atlantic Monthly, almost all my information of the outside world comes from Ava.
In place of the global array of news and stories that I used to get from various sources, I have the intensely local experience that is caring for Pip and Polly. They provide me with such a focused, first-hand array of comedy, drama, excitement, suspense, heartwarming moments, achievements, and thrills that the second and third-hand accounts of the world that come in through the news media, Facebook, movies, and the like all feel hazy and very far away. For example, in the last twenty-four hours, Pip completed a thirty-piece puzzle of the world practically on his own, asked me to talk about car wrecks over and over (this became a physics lesson), gave Polly an actual and unprompted kiss on the cheek for the first time, and melted down into tears on at least four different occasions. For her part, Polly added the words ‘cat,’ ‘yellow,’ and ‘purple’ to her vocabulary, happily gobbled so much macaroni and cheese that I thought she would burst, pooped in the toilet for the first time, and subsequently decided to celebrate by waking up at 11:45 last night and refusing to go back to sleep until 2 AM. There is nothing that I can read or watch that will ever match all of this.
In the last month, I have had an extra chance to ruminate on the bubble. I have made two trips up to Cincinnati to check in on our house, mow the yard, and do some basic maintenance, and each time I spent the entire 90 minute journey north listening to NPR. It was like briefly visiting a place I used to live in. So much was familiar and comfortable: the voices, the music, the regular sequence of the news segments. But, as has been the case anytime I have returned somewhere after a long absence, I noticed two things that I hadn’t felt before.
The first is that with all the reports and updates and commentary and analysis, it’s difficult to tell on a daily basis what is signal and what is noise. I used to think that I could filter through all the incoming material and figure out what mattered and what didn’t. Now, after my return visit, I don’t think that’s possible. So much of what is important in any given news narrative is determined post facto. The stories I heard on my way up to Cincinnati may be critical or may be worthless. For example, did the large drop in the Dow Jones Index signal a bad turn for the economy or did it just make more room for it to pop back up? The odds are with the latter, but it all depends on what happens the next day. There is no way of knowing beforehand. If I want narratives that are efficiently meaningful, I’m better off with history books. The daily (or hourly or minute-by-minute) news is just a giant crapshoot.
And that leads me to the second thing. When I turned off the radio upon arriving in Cincinnati, I felt somewhat informed but mostly just primed with anticipation about what will happen in the coming hours and days. I wanted to listen to more news on the way back to Lexington to see how things had changed during the two hours I was away from the radio. Then I wanted to check back in the next day. It was a compulsion that while not overwhelming was significant enough to make me think, “Was I addicted to the news?”
Usually upon hearing the word ‘addiction’ I think of things like alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, etc. But the withdrawal process I went through after each trip to Cincinnati had all the patterns of a person coming off an addiction. It makes me wonder. I’ve always thought of addiction as something abhorent and outside the bounds of normality. But if something as simple as listening to the news creates this kind of attachment in me, maybe I need to reconfigure my understanding. What if the propensity to addiction is a fundamental property of being human and the only real differentiating factor is the value placed on the things you are addicted to? If I substitute the word ‘addiction’ for ‘habit,’ how does that change my view of the world? I guess these are questions for another time.
In the meantime, I know that there is a balance to be struck between the world and my kids, a certain meeting point to be found between global and local knowledges that would make me a more socially functional person. But right now I am really happy with my bubble. The kids have less than five years before we release them into the wilds of the public school system. It’s a limited time opportunity. So, I’ll take some global ignorance in exchange for a little extra sensitivity to the local details. There’ll be plenty of time to catch up on all that other news later.
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