The Stories:
Endless Weekends. Now that I don't work outside of the home anymore, I no longer feel like I need to live my entire life—both all of the things I need to do and all of the things I want to do—during those two days each week. Time stretches out. Whole weekends go by where I accomplish almost nothing. It feels good and it feels strange. A little guilty. Which brings me the next story: how I spend far too much of my newly acquired free time.
Boredom and Screens. The boys have gotten very intense with their screen time lately. I tend to ignore it for a while, taking advantage of the quiet it creates, until it has built up to a head and then I careen in the other direction, the screen nazi. So when I got an email from a teacher about a homework situation, screens disappeared. Boys went through the stages of grief—surliness, teariness, stomping, sulking, a slow return to real play. I feel like it's my obligation to engage them in real-world activities, even when screens haven't been disappeared. I know kids need to figure out what to do with themselves when bored, that it's actually good for them to be bored, but left to their own devices that's just where they'd turn, to their devices. E is much more amenable to being roped into a game or a project than Z, who would rather wander off by himself and daydream. Which brings me to the next story.
Twindividuation. The essay I told you about last week, which will be coming out in the Multiples Illuminated anthology, is about how spending an intense amount of time together over the summer seemed to trigger an intense period of individuation between E and Z. But when I wrote it back in the fall, I hadn't seen nothin' yet. Then they chose to divide their wardrobe and dresser drawers, and busied themselves with separate activities much of the time. Now they hardly have anything to do with each other, rarely want to play together or talk to each other and are often cross with each other. I think this has been harder on me than it has been on them. I miss their tight bond. Which brings me to the next story, and back to the first one.
Time. I don't know how to characterize time raising kids. The cliches—"it goes by so fast" and "long days, short years" don't quite capture the reality. It's more like you, here, now are point A and time accelerates as it moves away from point A, in both directions. So that the present is slow and stretchy, like taffy, but the farther it moves into the past or future the less viscous and more fluid it becomes as it ribbons away from you like meltwater sheeting down a rock face. I think I'm mixing my metaphors there. Today you think you will spend the rest of your life arguing with your 11-year-old about how much screen time is enough screen time, but if you look back at that 11-year-old as a baby, he's careening away from you at light speed, even though then you thought you would be changing his diapers forever. Same when you looking into the future. He as a teenager, an adult, and old man, shoots away from you at warp speed, but when you're there in some future incarnation, time, a moment, will feel slow and still, as you both move glass beads along a mancala board with your old, withered hands.
On the topic of twin individualization, my boys chose to attend different high schools. It's been interesting to observe the distance it created and the ways they've chosen to overcome it.
ReplyDeleteWow, that's huge! I don't think I could handle the stress of the different schedules and driving and events, let alone the separation anxiety I would feel on their behalf.
DeleteIt's been challenging, but a nice way to test-drive what college will feel like a few years down the road.
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