If my 4-year-old had a mobile

This morning I had to leave my son at holiday day-care, screaming his head off.

He’s never been too keen on holiday club, for reasons he hasn’t been able to clearly express to us. This morning, he’d grumbled a bit on leaving home, but then seemed to be making a real effort to put a brave face on it, saying ‘don’t worry, I’ll be fine’ to his obviously deeply- concerned baby sister, and even yelling “yay!’ as we pulled into the car park. But as we entered the building, something changed. His face grew serious, then crumpled, then as I moved to go he simply dissolved into tears.

Anything I said only made him worse, so in the end I was obliged to leave him assaulting the ears of the long-suffering, council-employed teenage baby-sitters, and scurry away to leave my daughter with the nanny, then scurry even faster to get to work on time.

On the tram I wrestled with my demons, tears in my own eyes. I called my husband, who really didn’t appreciate me trying to off-load some of the emotional guilt in his direction: his take on the situation was along the lines of ‘life’s not all good, he’s got to learn to take the rough with the smooth’, and even better, ‘he must have been picking up negative vibes from you.’ No consolation there then.

So what to do? I felt as if I had to take action somehow. I finally realised that my reflex was to try to use that verbo-emotional sticking plaster of the digital age: the text message. I wanted to text my son, to say everything would be okay, chin up, mummy was thinking about him, mummy would come to get him as soon as she possibly could. As I sometimes do with my husband, sending him little “courage, I love you” messages full of xxs if I know he a tough day ahead, or just to briefly alleviate the boredom of commuting. A little good deed done, or a bad one undone, and so easily. A little text would alleviate my guilt and make everything okay.

I realise that even once my son is old enough to read, and old enough to have a phone of his own (heaven forbid), such messages would be of dubious benefit. Emotional sound-bites from a stressed-out mummy would not, I suspect, do much more than add guilt and anxiety to his side of the equation. Then, as now, would it really help him if I try to explain that mummy simply has to work, and that my holidays are a week shorter than his? Would it help if I tried to explain that we made choices? That we decided we needed a house that was big enough for him and his sister to have their own bedrooms, with a little bit of garden for him to expend his copious amounts of energy, to run and shout without disturbing the neighbours, far enough away from the city to allow him fresh air and garden fruit, and necessitate use of at least one car on a daily basis? Would it be possible to explain that, even if we did live in a tiny 2-bed suburban flat, and avoid absolutely all unnecessary expenses, both mummy and daddy would probably still have to work to make ends meet, including some of the school holidays?

It is not a problem with “collectivity”, as the holiday club director will no doubt try to tell me next time she sees me. My son is not nervous or anti-social, he is always asking to invite friends around or self-invite himself to theirs, and it is extremely rare that he objects to going to school. At present I count myself lucky that I am not one of those parents having to leave their children screaming and protesting at school 5 days a week, 30-plus weeks a year. Perhaps these parents are also feeling guilty because they have no choice, or guilty because they do have a choice as school is not in fact compulsory until the age of 6. But would we be doing our kids any favours if we kept them in the protected, parent-focused home environment for as long as absolutely possible?

My mother didn’t work, from my birth until I was at university. She stayed at home to raise the kids, a luxury afforded by the nature of my father’s employment (in a scientific domain), and by a carefully managed family budget (I remember going years without a holiday, for example). We were lucky, I know. This maternal presence meant I could read before I went to school, there were never logistical problems with childcare, and I always felt extremely well-supported at every step of my education. However, as an adult, I sometimes wonder if the results were exclusively positive. I rather doubt that I can be defined as more well-adjusted and ready to face the world than any of my peers whose mothers worked. Are maternal sacrifice and parental pressure more formative paradigms than maternal multi-tasking and somewhat blended childcare arrangements? And can me taking time out of both work and childcare to blog about this issue possibly gain anything other than the creation of yet another contradiction…?

Motherhood Facebooking...or Facebook mothering

I’ve got so many terribly important things I should be doing right now it’s completely unreal, so instead I’ve decided to whip up another blog entry. Returning yet again to my Facebook ranting, I going to take the easy way out by sharing my own recent attempt at a “micro-mini-series” of quasi-comical status updates, just to illustrate how it seems to me that Facebook comes to shape experience and not just report it. As I’ve said countless times, I don’t intend this blog to be about motherhood, but as motherhood ends up being the subject of a large proportion of my Facebook status updates, needs must…

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no.1: building a meccano motorbike whilst breast-feeding.

This was a genuine occurrence, and the one that set the whole series off. The question is, how many of the examples that follow were shaped by the fact I was now looking for humourous combinations of activities to report on Facebook?

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 2: cooking dinner whilst playing tennis - thankfully with an imaginary ball...

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 3: doing the household accounts whilst simultaneously entertaining a baby with a rattle and "wind the bobbin".

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 4: winding baby mid-feed whilst dealing with a felt-tip-pen-on-sofa-cushion crisis.

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 5: putting clothes away whilst helping my son and his imaginary friends fight an imaginary wolf and throw it down the stairs. Then rescuing said wolf because it is in fact a nice wolf.

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 6: talking to phone technical help/the electricity board/my boss etc. on the phone while pretending to the baby in the bouncy chair that she is getting full attention.

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 7: manoeuvring around trying to set up computer and internet connection without waking the sleeping baby in arms. Above all take care not to let the dummy fall...

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no. 8: making work phone-calls from the day-care centre car park with baby sleeping in the car. Because when you said you'd be in the office the week maternity leave ended you forgot it was also the school holidays.

Motherhood multi-tasking masterclass no.9: discovering work bag doesn't fit in pushchair. Well, it does, but not with the baby...

This last one was not even true. I could in fact fit the bag in, as long as I put it in first and placed the clip-on car seat afterwards.

What is striking to me, now I have compiled this list, is that none of these reports (with the possible exception of the first one) seem half as funny as they seemed to seem to me at the time. Which should really be a lesson to me. I guess real humour, like real literary art, stands the test of time because it has been carefully constructed: planned and drafted and re-read and edited and sculpted and perfected. The problem with the internet is that it makes it just too easy to put out any old tripe far too quickly. In my last entry I talked about the useful and necessary process of re-reading and editing made obligatory by the practice of blogging. Maybe it would be useful if the same applied to status updates and the like. If it were more necessary to take time, to “think before you tweet” for example, then a fair few of recent history’s media-mashup conflicts could have been avoided, and the internet would be not quite so chock-full of such utter rubbish. And like the paradox that ended my Blogging versus Motherhood entry, by writing about the problem I am adding to it.

Facebook funny stuff

Another lengthy pause since my last entry… but I’m not going to go on about that again, just accept that my blogging happens when it happens.

Instead, I will resume my ranting about Facebook. A friend of mine has brought to my attention a very interesting article by Thomas Jones in the London Review of Books[1], about the recently-revealed scandal that Facebook deliberately tried to control people’s feelings - ‘to make users miserable’, as headlines have claimed - as part of a mass psychological experiment, by manipulating the quantity of either positive or negative content in their newsfeeds. This issue opens up a whole new can of worms concerning social networking phenomena which goes far beyond the scope of my previous Facebook-themed griping (see Facebook Face-off and Status Update): the only reason I mention it here is because I find that Mr Jones rants about Facebook so much more eloquently than me. He opens thus:

Heaven knows there are reasons enough for anyone to feel miserable about Facebook: the mediation and commodification of ordinary human relationships, the mediation and commodification of every aspect of everyday life, the invasions of privacy, the ‘targeted’ adverts, the crappy photos, the asinine jokes, the pressure to like and be liked, the bullying, the sexism, the racism, the ersatz activism, the ersatz everything.

This sums the phenomenon up pretty well, in my opinion, and all of the issues he lists could perhaps become the subject of future blog entries. However, as I have also previously mentioned, much as I really want to detest it for so many reasons, not all my experience with Facebook is negative. Despite its compulsive, addictive properties, and the fact that it is mostly crammed full of utter rubbish, there are some aspects of Facebook that I cannot deny I have come to value. It has provided the means to communicate, albeit in a “mediated” and “commodified” way, with past acquaintances that I surely would have otherwise lost entirely from my life. I also appreciate the opportunity to – very occasionally, I hope – vent my frustrations concerning my personal or professional life, and to receive sympathy and well-intentioned advice that can sometimes even be useful. Most of all, I think, I appreciate Facebook as a means for diffusion of humour. I really like to laugh, and whilst I am not amused by all posts of supposedly comical intention, I have to say that Facebook has supplied me with countless cartoons, anecdotes and images that I have found delightfully witty, comical and mood-lightening. Furthermore, the nature of Facebook makes it so much easier to share and propagate such things (and cannot really be more annoying than the mass emails that were required to do so previously).

As I tried to express in Status Update, Facebook makes wannabe comedians of us all, as we strive to artfully combine wit and brevity in our status updates. There are regular stories in the press about how innocent Facebook posts or Twitter tweets have ‘gone viral’, being re-posted and re-tweeted far beyond the original intended audience of author Joe/Josephine Public, providing their 15 minutes of fame (or notoriety) and maybe even changing their lives forever (for example, this Business Insider article about the now famous “Hi Becky… spin the bottle…now wants to play Farmville” joke by ‘regular guy’ Chris Scott makes some interesting points about plagiarism, intellectual (or humouristic) property rights and the free-for-all “borrowing” of text that has become an internet norm).

Within my own, limited online social network (firmly set to “private, friends only”, for what it’s worth)  I would like to think that, if I broadcast elements of my personal life on Facebook, it is done mostly in the aim of delighting, amusing or otherwise speaking meaningfully to my tailor-made mini-audience. For examples, recent personal status updates have included:

My son is currently air-guitaring and singing his little heart out to "The Final Countdown". He doesn't know the words, but this does not deter him.

My son singing one of his improvised songs, in full voice as usual, comes out with....'move you arrr........ms....' Had us worried there for a mo... and he couldn't work out why we couldn't stop laughing.

Although my daughter can't speak yet, I know which of my children I can understand more easily at the moment. She cries when she's hungry, tired or has tummy ache. My son has just had a meltdown because I can't immediately produce a life-sized tractor for him to play with.

My son just walked into the kitchen asking "excuse me Madam, is this the restaurant?" Playing along, I said "yes sir, would you like a table for two adults and a child?" "No silly, for 3 adults and a wizard." As you do.

My son asks to sit on Daddy's motorbike, then asks 'where do we put the coin?'

[What this brief exercise has shown me, rather worryingly, is a) how my life revolves rather a lot around my children, and b) that they are really not going to be impressed should they ever somehow be able to read my back-dated Facebook profile in years to come.]

I guess I know my audience. I imagine these anecdotes will speak to those who know my children (some of my Facebook “friends” are family members, or parents of children in my son’s class at school), and to those whose links with me are more distant in time and geography, but are of my generation and so have children of similar age. For others, maybe they find such anecdotes funny, maybe not: that is up to them. If they get to bored or annoyed with my recurring parenthood references they can always block my posts or ‘un-friend’ (de-friend?) me.

Extending the comic intention further, there are those that attempt create a running theme in their status updates, like a kind of micro-mini-series – working on the assumption, I suppose, that their readers are paying enough attention to keep up with the thread and therefore appreciate the ongoing joke. One of my Facebook friends is a particular genius in this regard: he has recently been posting regular statuses that superbly parody the current trend for irritating “Which Disney/Harry Potter/Game of Thrones/Lord of the Rings etc. character are you?”-type quizzes. These are churned out in their hundreds by sites such as BuzzFeed.com and PlayBuzz.com, it seems, serving up trite quasi-character analysis (in the name of entertainment – I hope for all our sakes that no one is media-muddled enough to take them seriously) via sets of inane multiple choice questions, the “results” of which then choke our newsfeeds. I read somewhere that apparently we should really not be clicking these links, and certainly not sharing them, as they are part of yet more data-harvesting crookery (although I did succumb to the “What Country in the World Best Fits YourPersonality?” quiz and was astounded that it came up with the country I actually live in, and not my country of birth, despite the fact that for the first question I definitely answered ‘tea’ and not ‘a glass of wine’ or ‘whiskey’).

My friend’s series of “quiz” parodies are (like many of his other posts) skilful, amusing and sometimes admirably anti-establishment (usually an effective humoristic device as far as I am concerned). I have his permission to quote a few:

XXXX XXXXXXX just took the quiz "Which Famous Actress Are You" and got: "Childhood Shirley Temple singing "On the Good Ship Lollipop"!

XXXX XXXXXXX took the quiz "Which Bible Character Are You" and got: "Fish and Loaves."

XXXX XXXXXX  just took the quiz "Which Component of America's Failing Infrastructure Are You" and got "Moral/Ethical Fiber."

XXX XXXXXXX just took the quiz" "Which of Sagrada Familia's Spires Are You" and got "The ones that aren't finished yet."

XXXX XXXXXXX just took the quiz "Which Albert Ayler Song Are You" and got "Witches and Devils."

XXXX XXXXXXX just took the quiz "Which Tell-Tale Stain on Monica Lewinski's Blue Dress Are You" and got "Mayonaise."

Now these, for me, exemplify effective Facebook status update humour. If more people managed to recognise Facebook for what it is, and succeeded in turning the tool against itself, I think the future of our mass-media-mangled society would be just a little less bleak.

[1] Thomas Jones (2014), “Short Cuts”, London Review of Books, 17 July, p 6. 

 

Blogging versus Motherhood

As I said in the entry It’s been even longer, I don’t intend this blog to be about motherhood, but it is about contradictions, so here is one. In the same entry I questioned my return to blogging when I have so many other pressures on my time: in particular, why am I blogging when I should be being a mother. By which I mean, a better mother.

Such is the nature of our lives, and of my children, that I can’t really deprive them of my actual presence and attention by blogging. As hinted at in previous entries, most of my writing is done when they are asleep and I should be (although right now, I am being extra self-indulgent by writing this during daylight hours, between forkfuls of my late, microwave-reheated lunch, while my son is at school and my baby daughter finishes her nap in the bouncy chair next to me. The lunch aspect being the reason why I am not obliging myself to immediately dive into awaiting housework (washing up, laundry) or my thankfully-sometimes-doable-at-home work (current focus: exam corrections).

What I mean is, I sometimes feel guilty about the time I spend writing when I could/should be, for example, making flashcards to teach my son to read, baking cakes for his play dates, or absorbing parenting books to help me better master one of the most challenging jobs in the world (and practically the only one in which no one checks qualifications and suitability before engagement). What’s more, sometimes, writing about anything other than the sheer beauty of my daughter’s smiles and gurgles, or the glorious ecstasy of watching my two children gazing lovingly at each other, lying in our bed on a Sunday morning, seems somehow just plain ungrateful.  What? She writes/thinks about inane concepts like the downfall of humanity? Doesn’t she realise how lucky she is to have two such beautiful, healthy children, a good job, a nice house, etc. etc…

And of course, by devoting blogging time and space to such a subject, I have added a further layer of paradox to the theme of this blog that does nothing whatsoever to assuage my guilt.