The Winter of Our Disconnect

by Susan Maushart

  To be honest, I’d been thinking about running away to the woods myself a lot toward the end of 2008. It wasn’t just the three teenagers I was wrangling: Anni, who’d just turned eighteen (terrifyingly, the legal drinking age in Western Australia, where we lived); Bill, fifteen, the man of the house (in his own mind, at least); and Sussy, the baby, fourteen (“Juliet’s age when she got married, Mum,” as she constantly reminded me).

  They were at tricky ages, to be sure. But then, at age fifty, so was I. A career journalist, I was now part of the brand-new podcasting platform for ABC Radio. I loved the challenge of spitting out a weekly program, and I especially loved mastering the digital technology that modern broadcasting entails. What I didn’t love was the huge time pressure. I was away from home more than I’d ever been since I’d started having babies, and the sense that I was losing control of my house and its contents—i.e., my kids—was ominous.

  At the same time, our media habits had reached a scary kind of crescendo. It wasn’t just the way the girls were becoming mere accessories of their own social-networking profile, as if real life were simply a dress rehearsal (or, more accurately, a photo op) for the next status update; or the fact that my son’s domestic default mode was set to “illegal download,” and his homework, which he’d insisted he needed a quad-core gaming computer and high-speed broadband to complete, was getting lost in transmission—although that was all part of it.

  Thinking back, I realize there was no one breaking point, no single epiphany or aha! moment, but rather a series of such moments: scenes and stills I can scroll through in no particular order of importance, like a digital slideshow set to shuffle.

  The abiding image of the back of Bill’s head, for example, as he sat, enthroned before his PC in the region formerly known as the family room. Or the soundtrack of the conversations we’d been having for the last year or so, the ones that began with me saying anything at all (“Have you done your homework?” “Are you still enrolled in high school?” “Can you please put down your weapon and press ‘pause’ now? It’s dinnertime”) and ended with him replying, “Yeah. What?”

  Maybe it was the evening the video clip playing on the corner of Sussy’s desktop unexpectedly waved and called out gaily, “Hi, Susan!” It turned out to be a school friend streaming herself live on webcam via Skype. When my vital signs restabilized, I moved swiftly from simple fear to profound panic. What other visitors were logging on to her bedroom, in real time, full color, and stereo sound, while I slept?

  Anni generally hit the trends first and most furiously. Always precocious, she’d been the first in her school to launch into MySpace way back in Year 10. (Not content with her own profile, she’d speedily created one for Jesus Christ [Relationship Status: It’s Complicated] and another for Rupert, our pug [Favorite Movie: Men in Black].) At eighteen, she was still bingeing on social networking—Facebook being her drug of choice—and was also prone to sudden-onset gaming benders. Most recently, it was the online multiplayer word game called TextTwist. I’d watch her shoulders tense as she stabbed the keys with a viciousness normally reserved for conversations about curfews. And when she started gaining on her goal to become the world’s number-one player, her jubilation had (for me) a disturbing edge. Watching her rapt, LCD-lit eyes, I couldn’t help but think of Nero updating his status while Rome burned.

  My own patterns were getting a little weird too. I never thought I’d be the kind of single mother who’d openly sleep with her iPhone, but ... yeah. (I told myself it was no different from reading a book in bed—which, if I hadn’t been watching feature-length movies and shopping for underwear, might well have been true.) In fact, if I didn’t drag my laptop, a pair of speakers, my digital recorder, and a camera in too, I sometimes felt a little lonely. I told myself I was just doing my job. But there were times I looked less like a journalist than some demented IT technician in a nightie. Good times, good times.

  However, it wasn’t until I started surfing the Net, replying to text messages, listening to podcasts, and, on one memorable occasion, doing a live radio interview—all the while “otherwise engaged” in the loo—that I admitted I had a problem. Was I was using media to (cringe) self-medicate, on the fast track to becoming a middle-aged Lindsay Lohan of the App Store? Was it time to check myself in to rehab?

  There was other stuff that was bothering me too. We were eating meals as a family less and less often. Never, if you want to get technical about it. The girls were either splurge-snacking or experimenting with weird diets. For days on end I swear Sussy ate nothing but condiments. Bill—aka the Cereal Killer—seemed to survive largely on shredded wheat and instant noodles, foods that shared a common, disturbing resemblance to roof insulation.

  They were still having friends over, but more and more of their socializing took the form of little knots of spectators gathered around the cheery glow of YouTube—or, worse, dispersed into separate corners, each to his own device. Their sleep patterns were heading south too—hardly surprising given that the alerts from their three cell phones were intermittently audible through the night, chirping like a cadre of evil crickets.

  And there were other things they’d hit the “pause” button on. Music—either playing it or listening to it as anything other than the background buzz to an instant messaging exchange. Books. Exercise. Conversation. And that other thing. Whaddaya call it? Oh, yeah. Life.

  Although my own media habits were hardly immaculate, I could at least remember a time when things had been different. Simpler. More direct. Less tangled up with freaking USB cables. I found myself fantasizing about what life would be like in our house if I pulled the plug once and for all, hurtling us cold turkey into Wi-Fi withdrawal—myself and my omnipresent information IV included.

  And at that stage, it was a fantasy. As a journalist and author, my livelihood depends on technology. People who wax nostalgic about a golden age of any kind, whether technological or political or cultural, have always seriously annoyed me. It’s like listening to my mother talking about going to the movies for a quarter and having change left over to buy a hamburger and a Coke and, for all I know, stock options in MGM. The way I see it, it’s hard enough to live in the present moment without somebody trying to drag you back to some sepia-tinged, hyperidealized pseudotopia that is usually three parts “La Vie en Rose” to one part irritable bowel syndrome. Every mythical “golden age,” I have always believed, was exactly that. Mythical.

  I grew up in the sixties and seventies, and although I have fond memories of I Love Lucy, instant mashed potatoes, and the Latin mass (in no particular order of importance), I do NOT believe my own childhood was superior to that of my own children. Parents and kids lived in two separate worlds in those days. That had its plusses, sure—like when you jumped on your bike and went to play at your friend’s house till puberty, and nobody panicked. But it also had its minuses. Like most everybody else in my generation, I watched way too much dumb black-and-white TV, ate ridiculous snack food—come on, aerosol cheese?—and wouldn’t have dreamed of confiding what I really felt and thought to a grown-up.

  So nostalgia for “the way we were” isn’t one of my weaknesses. I don’t believe in avoiding your own reality, and I don’t believe in the healing power of deprivation. The temptation to fix our family’s discontents by ripping the modem from its socket smacked of both these fallacies.

  Plus, I was menopausal. Sweet reason was not exactly what you’d call my strong suit.

  If it hadn’t been for Thoreau—or, more accurately, Sherman Paul, who wrote the introduction to my well-thumbed Riverside edition—I would probably have put away the idea with the rest of my hare-brained maternal schemes.a It was Paul’s succinct explanation of why Thoreau took to the woods in the first place that was the tipping point. “He had reduced the means of life,” Paul had written, “not because he wanted to prove he could go without them, or to disclaim their value in enriching life, but because they were usually factitious—they robbed one of life itself.”<
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  Thoreau’s inspired mania for simplifying life, in other words, was just like Michelangelo’s gift for “simplifying” a chunk of stone: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” It was an act of creation and courage—not destruction, not fear. By isolating himself at Walden Pond, Thoreau hadn’t run away from life. He’d run toward it. Why couldn’t we leave our lives of quiet, digital desperation and do the same?

  Now that I’d done the reframe—it wasn’t something I’d be doing to my family, it was something I’d be doing for them!—I couldn’t wait to begin. There was only one thing stopping me.

  Oh, all right. Three things.

  Anni, Bill, and Sussy, like most teenagers, live in a pre-Copernican universe. They are convinced the sun revolves around them. As their mother, I have done little to challenge this view. So when I finally worked up the courage to spring The Experiment on them for real, I chose my moment carefully. The stakeholders would need to be in a good mood. There would need to be lots of distractions: lights, music, refined sugar, whatever it took. And there would need to be witnesses.

  Gracetown, Western Australia—go on, Google it—is a remote and ridiculously tiny coastal community on the southwest coast of Australia. It is renowned for its jaw-dropping Indian Ocean beaches, fearsome surf breaks, and curious lack of normal utilities. Gracetown is “electrified,” but has no municipal water or gas supply—each house has its own rainwater tank and gas bottles—and no cell phone or Internet coverage. A persistent teenager climbing to the cliffside community’s highest peak might get reception for a minute or two—and of course all teenagers are persistent—but that aside, we’re talking Walden Pond with an Aussie accent.

  So choosing to spend Christmas at Gracetown with our BFF (Best Friend Family) the Revells wasn’t exactly a coincidence.

  We’d arrived a few days early to settle into the rhythm. I’d insisted that everybody pack light, even the girls. It was one roll-on trunk of hair products each, I told them sternly, and no exceptions. And when Bill asked me if I’d seen his Nintendo DS, I thought, okay, this is my moment. I took a deep breath, looked him in the eye ... and lied. I said I had no idea where it was. I had, in fact, hidden it at the bottom of a box of disused printer drivers the previous night, may the Good Lord have mercy upon my soul. “Let’s read books in the car, honey,” I suggested brightly. He muttered something under his breath. It was either “sick” or “suck,” and I was pretty sure I knew which. In the end, I hauled out the iTrip, and we listened to podcasts on the three-hour car journey south—This American Life (my favorite radio show on any hemisphere), The Hamish and Andy Show, The Moth. Just being in a small space, listening to the same medium, made it feel like an old-fashioned family holiday already. But in a good way, in a good way.

  Maybe I’d choked on the Nintendo thing, but the car trip had renewed my courage. Gracetown was the perfect setting in which to do the deed, even down to its name, with its faintly fundamentalist-slash-Elvis-impersonator overtones. It was just a case of choosing my moment. Christmas Day was only a few days hence, I reflected Grinchishly. Why not lower the boom then?

  My dark thoughts about going off the grid dated as far back as Anni’s four-year-old fixation with a certain Lady Lovely Locks video, featuring characters with names such as “ShiningGlory” and “Furball,” and fiercely hair-driven plotlines. At the same time, like every other parent of toddlers, I was grateful for the thirty-minute break. (Bill’s first sentence, which he bellowed solemnly at 5:15 every morning, was “Watch White!”—as in “The name’s White. Snow White.”) Yet as the years—and the technology—flew by, I rarely got beyond the grumbling stage. Occasionally I’d announce dramatically that I was “pulling the plug” so that everybody could read a book, or play a game, or just bicker with one another the old-fashioned way: face-to-face. Sometimes I’d even make good on it. “But I was doing my homework!” they’d wail, as the anime or the YouTube video or the MSN conversation froze midframe, exactly as if an evil fairy had waved her wand of doom. It felt good to pretend I still had some power in my own home. Deep down, though, even I—a woman so out of touch I still referred to “taping” shows on TV, as if they were packing boxes, or sprained ankles—was aware that ripping the modem out of the wall once every three or four weeks was a case of spitting into the Zeitgeist.

  Who can ever say for certain what makes a person finally take that crucial leap into a life-changing decision? In my own case, I suspect The Experiment had roots as long and tangled as my fourteen-year-old’s hair extensions. They probably went back to my graduate work in media ecology at New York University, my fascination with transcendentalist thinkers like Thoreau and Emerson, and my move to Australia in the late eighties.

  There were more proximate causes too. One was an interview I did for one of my podcasts with a family of six kids, ranging in age from two to twelve, who were growing up entirely screen-free. Naturally I’d expected cult involvement, or at the very least a full-time parent-at-home. But no. Both parents worked as real-estate agents. There was no evidence of an extraterrestrial link. And the kids were amazing—full of excitement and ideas and trouvé collections and craft projects. Not fussy, adult-designed ones made from kits, but the kind you make from dead leaves and macaroni and toilet-paper rolls. They had a fort in the woods, and a tree swing, and a big dress-up box full of old clothes. “Don’t you guys ever get bored?” I asked toward the end of the interview, almost desperate to find an edge to the story. But I already knew what the answer would be: a resounding “Nup.” These kids knew they were a bit unusual, but they didn’t feel deprived, if they thought about it at all—which, until the arrival of a woman with a microphone, I’m not sure they had. After all, their compensation for living without media was, to borrow Sherman Paul’s phrase, nothing less than “life itself.”

  When I think it through, I realize there was all this backstory to my own decision. But reduce it to a sound bite and it was simply this: I was worried about my kids. About how they were using their time, and their space, and their minds. That’s the center of gravity that pulled the whole thing together ... and it’s also, maybe, where my somewhat offbeat and bizarre life story crosses your own.

  So, when I lowered the boom amid the happy detritus of a normal Australian Christmas morning—for chestnuts roasting on an open fire, substitute bacon and eggs on the barbie and the intoxicating whiff of 30+ sunscreen—there was nothing impulsive about it. Why I was making this decision was pretty clear in my mind. How I was going to obtain buy-in was a total blur. Granted, I do have kind of a gift for the pitch. In another, more lucrative life I would have made a bang-up used-car salesman. My enthusiasms—of which I have many—are as infectious as swine flu. My kids could tell you stories. Like the time I came home, flung open the door, and announced gleefully, “Hey, kids! Guess what?! I’ve lost my license for three whole months! Isn’t it great? Because we are going to have such fun learning all about public transportation!” (It was just a few speeding fines. And not big ones either, until you added them all together. “Where I learned to drive—on the Long Island Expressway—anybody who doesn’t go ten miles an hour over the speed limit is a pussy,” I tried explaining to the constable. LOL he did not.)

  I did such a consummate smoke-and-mirrors number when my marriage broke up that my eldest, who was four, literally didn’t notice. “Where’s Dada, anyway?” she finally inquired several weeks later. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? He’s got a cool new house and lucky you will get to stay there sometimes, just like Karen Brewer!” (Oh, for the days when a well-placed allusion to The Baby-Sitters Club was all it took to save one’s sorry maternal ass!)

  I don’t lie, ever. Hardly. I sell. (“That’s not a ‘vegetable,’ Bill. Why, that’s a mouthwatering side dish of tender, buttery baby beans!”) But let’s face it: Spinning slightly overripe bananas to your toddlers is one thing—yes, I’ve been known to sing the Chiquita Banana song, and fake tap-dance too, if that’s what it took. Selling yo
ur teenagers on the concept of giving up their information and entertainment lifelines for six months is quite another. To be honest, it kind of made giving birth in a manger in Bethlehem look like level-one Tetris.

  Part of my strategy revolved around the presence of friendly witnesses: Mary and Grant and their teenage daughters, Ches and Torrie. Our fellow holiday-makers and oldest family friends would support me, and their presence would prevent any attempted worm-outs. It was Mary who unexpectedly fed me my cue that morning, as she watched the girls unwrap their main presents—obscenely overpriced appliances hyped as “the Rolls-Royce of hair straighteners” (Lady Lovely Locks, may you rot in hell).

  “But Suse,” Mary blurted out. “Will they be able to use those when The Experiment starts?”

  I shot her a look that could depilate, but it was too late. Everyone had heard her.

  “Kids, I have an announcement to make,” I began. All rustling of wrapping paper and gnawing of candy canes ceased. The girls put down their straighteners. Bill popped the lid back on his Sex Wax (a hair product, essentially, for surfboards). Even Rupert looked up with a mixture of anxiety and apprehension. But then he’s a pug. He always looks like that. I took a deep breath and I hit them with it.

  I didn’t talk about being worried about their well-being, or their school performance, or their sleeping habits, or my fears for the arrested development of their social, intellectual, or spiritual skills. That would have been too much like nagging. It would have put them on the defensive. It would have started a conversation, and a conversation, frankly, was the last thing I wanted. The important thing was to announce, not to “suggest” or, heaven forbid, “discuss.”