The Winter of Our Disconnect Read Online Free PDF

discs. “Wow,” Sussy mused. “What’s woodwork?” Patiently, I pointed out the painted molding between the floor and wall in her bedroom. “Cool,” she said politely. “I never noticed that before.” I’d lay odds she’ll never notice it again either.
    Partly, I blame myself. When they were younger I had cleaners, like many other working parents. The beauty of that was not having to freak out so much about the housework. The tragedy was that it encouraged an “Elves and the Shoemaker” mentality: that cleaning and tidying were done magically in the dark of night by kind fairies. My own ironclad habits of making my bed perfectly, complete with hospital corners and calculatedly “casual” pillow placement, are a source of genuine wonderment to my children. They used to bring in their friends sometimes for a peek, as if my bedroom were some exotic animal enclosure.
    I know plenty of other parents who don’t maintain any adult spaces—and who imply it’s a form of fascism to try. Like the neighbors of mine whose double-story heritage home for many years bore a hand-painted wooden sign that announced CAMPBELL’S HOUSE, Campbell being their four-year-old son. (Campbell’s mum and dad, you may not be surprised to learn, have since divided up Campbell’s assets and gone their separate ways.) The way I see it, there are degrees of lunacy, and I like to think our own family inhabits a kind of happy medium between Campbell’s House on one hand and Brat Camp on the other.
    Kids don’t just invade adult space, of course. They also invade adult time. And this is a commodity less easily cordoned off with bi-fold doors. Take “bedtime,” for example. When I was a child it was nothing “to have to go to bed and see / the birds still hopping on the tree,” as Robert Louis Stevenson somewhat sourly observed. Daylight savings or no daylight savings, you were tucked in at 6:30 p.m. And if you needed sunglasses and a UV blocker, so be it.
    Today, “adult time” has become something that must be chiseled painfully from the bedrock of family life—or, more accurately, dug at its shoreline in haste, before the next high tide. I was strict about bedtimes when my children were little. (Sleep is to single mothers what helium is to a hot-air balloon.) But over the years, I bowed to the pressure to lighten up, from both their peers and my own. No woman wants to be seen as a control freak, least of all those of us who make our beds with a protractor and a spirit level.
    Like so many other parents of my generation, I have grudgingly come to accept the prevailing view that “me time” is an indulgence—the temporal equivalent of a slab of mudcake or forbidden cigarette, the guilty exception to the rule that says to parents, and to mothers especially, and to single mothers most of all: “Your time is not your own.” In the age of helicopter parenting, we are not supposed to want things any other way. Hovering, chopperlike, over our children’s every move, as if they were escaped criminals or traffic accidents, is normal. In fact, we are supposed to be spinning our propellers with glee at the privilege. Being on call 24/7 is what having children is all about now—even children who are taller and more sexually active than you are (not that that’s saying much in my case).
    Opinions vary on whether the trend toward on-demand parenting is a healthy change. In a report on parenting college-age children, New York Times journalist Tamar Lewin spoke to one sophomore who uses more than three thousand cell phone minutes a month, most of it on calls to her parents, aunt, and grandparents. “I might call my dad and say, ‘What’s going on with the Kurds?’ It’s a lot easier than looking it up,” she points out. Her father is good with this. “Whether you’re wondering about a sweater or a class, it’s great to have someone to bounce questions off. And why not a parent?” he asks genially. 1
    Um, maybe because the whole