Distracted

I just read an article about being a distracted parent.  It was a bit overwrought in my opinion – MAN, do twenty first century parents really know how to beat ourselves up – but its point is one I take.  And even before I read this article, I knew that this topic was the parenting topic to which my attention needed to turn.  This parenting gig – heck, this being a living responsible adult gig – is just a mess.  I feel like I am forever turning this way and that, shoring up the sagging areas, leaving behind something that I’ve finally tinkered and perfected to awesomeness which is now just going to fall apart as it loses my attention.  Don’t we all feel this way?

Anyway, this particular sagging area is all about being distracted by your electronic devices.  And I’m guilty as charged.  And I don’t even HAVE an iPhone yet – nor a job that requires me to check one frequently!

Our excessive home computer use isn’t wholly without reason or purpose.  We are two parents with (essentially) full time jobs and only part time child care.  There are afternoons where TV does some babysitting while we work nearby.  This is how it has to be sometimes – it just does, and I can’t apologize for that.  I’m earning this degree to get this job in large part to take care of my responsibility for these children, after all.  I must be able to give these kids everything they need, and a lot of things they want, and goddamm if Jack didn’t already break his glasses.  I can’t buy my clumsy three year old fifteen pairs of glasses in a year without an awesome job to pay for them.  (He’s also about to lose a tooth that he damaged.  Will he have to get a bridge?  Time will tell . . .)  And by keeping our child care at a bare minimum, we saved almost $40,000 over three years.  I calculated this once.  I am not exaggerating.  $40,000 more debt avoided.  (PS CHILD CARE COSTS – WHAT UP, DUDE??  RIDICULOUS these days, especially if you live in a city.)  Doing a cost-benefit analysis, in our imperfect situation, I think we made the best choices we could.  The kids can suffer a little too much tv now and then.

Also, when we are at home there is virtually always a child awake.  Due to their non-synced naps and nighttime schedules – in part dictated by external scheduling forces, and partly by their own little internal clocks – we always have one or the other hanging out with us.  Jack goes to bed at 9 or so, and sad to say we follow almost immediately after.  (Liam gets us up so early, you see!)  If one of us is going to indulge in messing around, a kid will probably be about observing that messing around.

Thirdly, we have The Poverty.  There is no money for going to dinner, going to bars, going on vacations, going to movies, going anywhere together that requires a babysitter . . . the other day I went to my bestie’s birthday downtown, and felt so guilty for buying a beer and a ticket to a concert that I nearly didn’t go.  The Professor was invited to this coed affair but didn’t come with me, because buying TWO beers and TWO concert tickets, not to mention a babysitter, would have been an indulgence well beyond our means.  This is the last year of this, but still – our only diversions these days are messing around on the internet or watching Netflix, with the occasional splurge on taking the boys out for pizza.  Everybody needs some kind of outlet, be it reality tv, an awesome bottle of wine, or a half hour on facebook.  Becoming parents didn’t erase that need, and I feel like it’s ok to show my kids that I take time for myself.

Finally, my internet time-wasters of choice – that is, facebook, blogs, and occasional twittering – are not wholly without value.  These aren’t the McDonald’s fries of my computer time “diet” – there are some important connections that I’ve made and nurtured here that make me a fuller, happier person.  Writing this blog, and interacting with the people who read it and write in their own spaces, has become so vital to my continuing happiness that I just can’t imagine life without it.  And facebook really takes very little of my time, while allowing me to keep up with so many people I know and love in real life, people who I rarely get to spend real time with.  I keep my friends list pared down to actual friends, and I get to see pictures of their babies, hear about their jobs, and when they go through something tough, I can learn about it and send private messages of support.  It’s vital to my staying connected in the real world.

BUT.

These excuses take me only so far.  Whole afternoons have gone by where I was in charge of the children and trying to work, but they were too whiny for me to get anything substantive done, so I messed around reading blogs instead.  And the children – my lovely boys, my super duper sons – were RIGHT THERE, begging to play with me.  The reason I know that this distraction issue needs my attention is some of the behaviors they’ve started to exhibit.  They punch the laptop.  They flop their arms across the keyboard.  Liam grabs the screen and wobbles it back and forth – Jack tries to climb onto it and put himself between my face and the screen.  He’ll say  “Mama.  Mama, listen to me.  Listen Mama.  No more with the ‘puter.  Please listen.  OK Mama, I need to go potty.”  And suddenly I snap out of my computer-induced hypnosis and realize that he’s been asking me to take him to the potty for five minutes, and I was just murmuring non-responses to get him to go away and leave me to my addiction.

I mean, if that don’t break your heart, you ain’t human.

The only solution here is to make some hard and fast rules for myself, to stick to them, and to familiarize the children with them. If I genuinely need to work, I canNOT have those little chubby arms sabotaging me by banging on the keys.  And there will be times when I must do work while the kids play nearby.  But I need to earn their cooperation by agreeing not to just waste time on the internet when they are in my care.  If I’m not the Facebooking-Mom-Who-Cried-Wolf, I think I can teach them to respect the time that I am legitimately working.  But that’s hard.  This genuinely is like an addiction, and trying to structure some sort of healthy relationship with my internet while resisting binge-internetting is going to be a challenge.  Also, sometimes what they want to do is boring.  It straight-up is.  And those of us growing up in these digital years have lost our ability to be bored.  (Going to my friend’s birthday downtown, I had to ride the streetcar WITHOUT A BOOK.  I had nothing to read, no phone to play with, nothing to do but stare out the window.  I obviously survived, but I was sort of unpleasantly startled by how much I dreaded the very prospect of an unproductive, non-distracted half hour in the streetcar.)

So anyway, I’m not going to beat myself up about past behavior, but I am going to try to change it.  Step One – figure out a structure that encompasses my need to work, my need for some virtual connection time, and my responsibility to give my darlings an adequate amount of time with my full focus that they is optimally healthy for all of us.  I’ll get back to you once I’ve made those decisions and moved on to Step Two.  Whatever that is.