Right now, my son is looking for his iPad. After seeing him spend two hours watching train videos and play a game called “Township,” which involves spending large amounts of time loading trains with fruit, I told him “screen time is over” and then hid his iPad. It’s in the main entry hall of this ridiculous house – which appears, for those of you who are interested, in season three, episode one of Ozark, a Netflix series, where a squatter lives in this house and cooks on the same stove I use every night. I hid it behind a random work of art which is leaning on the overwrought concrete mantle of a fake fireplace. I doubt he’ll find it soon, but who knows. While he’s looking, I have a bit of spare time.
I don’t know what typical eight-year old boys are like, for a whole host of reasons. First off, I was never typical; my parents remind me that they were always puzzled about me, and I think I’ve written before that the curse of self-awareness, of being aware of this ability we have to know ourselves and know that others are also themselves, hit me with full force when I was three years old (I can still remember the day), whereas most people I’ve met look at me with a kind of puzzled, Homer Simpson like open eyed stare when I even talk about the phenomenon. Secondly, I’m forty-five years old in 2020, and thus unqualified and unequipped to know what is typical for a cohort of children who were raised with handheld computers more powerful than the NSA code-breaking Crays that were around when I was a kid. Third, we’re living through a somewhat more strange than usual period of social history, making even the usual unconscious biases which establish our notion of “typical” – supplied helpfully by the push-pull of shaming, approbation, and unconcern from our peers and by the subtle but continuous signals from media and advertising – out of touch.
That last reason is making things a little easier for me: I don’t have to think of whether my son is normal or typical or whatever. I can just focus on him as him. My external signalling is limited to reruns of The Simpsons and Mad Men, so I’m forced to just wing it on what is good for him right now. I’m sure those of you who know me well will chuckle at this, because my parenting style does involve bits of both. I mix a batch of martinis each evening, after the boy finishes his work, has had some outdoor time (during which I sweep the floors, make beds, do laundry), and before I start cooking supper. Our existence, meanwhile, has a certain cartoonish, non-realistic quality to it: my work is strangely disconnected from anything tangible, and we spend a lot of time doing random things that, in normal worlds, no one would do. The dog chases deer through the yard like a kind of Wile E. Coyote; I order things from the Internet like Homer might, although most of my purchases lately have been of mid-20th century Central European authors; there is another family that randomly shows up and consumes things and leaves. The house is an absurdity, completely disconnected from his past life in Seattle or, for that matter, from my past lives in any of the dozen places I’ve called home since I left the parents back in 1991.
In such a time, in such a place, the only guideposts I have – other than Matthew Weiner’s superb scripting and historically correct costumes and set design, and of course James L. Brooks’ 30 years of animated satire – are internal. I tell him to do his school work because, well, I think he should. I tell him not to eat too much candy, to be polite at the table, to do chores and keep his room clean because, well, I think he should. Two hours of Zoom class time a week is not going to establish social norms in the way that thirty five hours of class time would during a typical year. Even the three or four hours of FaceTime I try to arrange for him with his friends doesn’t have that much of an impact. This comes down to two things: my intent, focus, and moral energy, and his intent, focus, and moral energy, and how we two human beings interact.
This is the silver lining of the shutdown of our economy and society as we’ve become accustomed to it – well, one of the many silver linings, but maybe the one I feel closest to right now because of the circumstances of being a single parent. I have to focus on what it means to be a parent, and part of that for me is focusing on who my son is at this moment. He’s a good learner; he’s lousy at being outdoors. He’s a fantastic reader; I hope he never owns a pet. He’s helpful and kind; he’s not a good conversationalist. He is his own person, he is not me, and that’s a wonderful thing. But also, he’s eight years old. He’s not an infant, but he’s not yet fully sentient. He’s intelligent, but he’s not self-aware.
I mentioned earlier that my moment of self-awareness came way too early. Once I crossed that threshold, it was easy to fool my parents, and even easier to fool my teachers at school. Adults are used to looking at children as blank slates, and I think that is largely the case – but once a child becomes aware that other adults are exactly like them except maybe bigger, smellier, and with a higher level of integration into a society that even after one becomes sentient is still overwhelmingly complex, they aren’t blank slates any longer. They have their own perspective, their own template for viewing the world, and you have to respect that template – you have to engage with it, not impose your own on them – in order to succeed going forward. My son, so far as I can tell, doesn’t have that yet. He’s getting there – closer every day – but so far, he can be redirected and shown new things and he just absorbs them without comment or reaction. And his “acting out” is so predictable as to be clearly just a stimulus-response binary pathway. He’s still building the database, his mind is still constructing the operating system – which is fine, by the way. For reasons I’ll never understand I had compiled my DOS 1.0 at age three; most people I talk to didn’t do so until they were in their teens. And plenty of people I interact with still haven’t done so in their late middle age. Or ever.
Mark’s recent essay has given me some pause in reflecting on this, I have to admit. When I read it I was prepared to agree wholeheartedly with the idea of trying to stay being born, but I’ve come to find the analogy somewhat incorrect when applied to my current circumstances. My son is, after all, much closer to the moment of birth than I am: roughly thirty-eight years closer. It gives me a window to see what birth really is, and what it means to be so much further away. And I have to admit, I don’t think I’m trying to stay being born; nor, for that matter, is my son, nor do I really want him to. What I see my son doing is approaching a kind of doorway. He’s been dropped into a world not of his own choosing – not that choice is a possibility, so far as we know, putting karma and reincarnation to the side for a moment – and is right now going through a painful and puzzling and weird and kind of fun process of gathering enough information such that his brain can finally integrate across a broad enough data set so as to grant himself a worldview. That moment – when a worldview has been constructed and integrated and finally makes sense to him is approaching, I can see it. I’m doing my best not to push it, but I can see it coming, and it’s really, truly, amazingly wonderful to be a part of.
But seeing that, I keep thinking of the moment when that worldview first hit me – age three, sitting on my parent’s bed, realising that for some reason I’d dressed up in a collared shirt, clip-on tie, and blazer, and holding a toy briefcase with a small corncob pipe and some blank sheets of paper inside. I looked at myself in the mirror above my mom’s dresser and realised it was all kind of an act. I wouldn’t have used those terms when I was three, but I probably did tell my mom, or look at the three year old staring back at me and say the same, that I wasn’t being real, I was playing something. I knew I was playing something. But I didn’t know what was real, and in that moment I started on this lifelong journey of trying to find out what was, in fact, real.
Note that this is a razor’s edge. Most people we know cross that threshold and at some point leave it behind. They decide that the worldview they have constructed – always with the help of others, always informed by other worldviews, often taken wholesale from others because figuring it out on our own takes too much work – is correct. They leave that threshold and enter into stasis. The child who is still forming something, still absorbing, still exploring, is intellectually superior to those in stasis: they may be emotionally stunted, they may have no concept of their own spirituality, and physically they may be monsters, but intellectually, they are still in the garden of Eden. Those that cross into self-awareness and then stop asking the questions demanded of self-awareness are simply on the milk train towards death. The adult-child who is still wondering how the world works is still asking for a parent, still asking for an adult to guide them, still rejecting the adult life of self-reflection; the post-child adult who has stopped asking what is incorrect about their view of the world, who has stopped asking what the real is, has chosen to ignore the dignity of a complex universe which can’t be trapped within a single conception of real.
Needless to say, I still haven’t found the real. But I have succeeded – with fits and starts, to be sure – of not forgetting that moment and that insight: that when we dress up and go out into the world, we are not being ourselves, we are being something different. But what “ourselves” is does not emerge magically when we come back to our room and take off our costume. No, putting on the costumes is how we learn what is real and what is not. And it shouldn’t stop. I don’t like the word “should”, but I’ll use it here: we should never stop trying on what might be a better version of the real, even when we find a version that seems really good, really secure or pleasant or fine or whatever. We should stay alive for what might be better in the next room.
One problem for me as a parent, though, is how to nurture my son so that he can discover that moment on his own. You can’t push it – it’s not your moment, it’s your child’s own experience – but you also have to be a parent. In the meantime – and even afterwards, though according to my parents, it’s much easier to teach a human being who is self-reflective and self-aware – you have to ingrain basic moral skills, like kindness, and respect for others, and non-violence, and doing things that are important even if it isn’t fun. So there’s the daily struggle to straighten up his room, and clear the table after breakfast and supper, and to do all of his schoolwork – not just the math and science and word problems he gravitates towards, but the writing assignments and penmanship practice that he dislikes with such a passion. It’s about teaching him not to cheat at games that have rules, while also teaching him it’s okay to change rules when we agree the rules are lame. And how to raise the issue that the rules are lame instead of forcing it on others.
On that note: if anyone out there plays Monopoly, yes, landing on Go! and collecting $400 makes for a better game, but putting all of the Chance and Community Chest and Income Tax and Luxury Tax money on Free Parking really destroys it.
When my son hits that threshold of having his own worldview, when he can articulate it and explain why mine is wrong, I’m going to have a field day. I’m going to celebrate like it’s 1999, even though he’s not particularly a Prince fan (yet), and I’ll pop Champagne even though I hope he’ll be underage when the moment hits him. And I’ll tell him that the key to life is to stay in the threshold, to stay aware of having a worldview but to be aware of just how tenuous it is, how mysterious and complex the world remains, how he should never leave the framing doubt that his worldview is probably wrong. The key to not dying is not to be born continuously: it’s to be aware of the mystery of consciousness once you’re aware that you have it. That doesn’t come at birth. It comes at a different moment for all of us, sometimes not at all. Being born gives us a chance to experience it, but still, the path to that threshold is our own.
My son still hasn’t found his iPad. Now he’s outside in the pool, swimming as long as he can while some thunderstorms gather in the southwest, with the wind picking up, and with the dog deciding it’s time to head indoors. The boy will come back when I call him, but for now, he’s fine. The moment is coming soon enough.