Three

There's something about YouTube that makes me feel particularly middle-aged. Not the existence of YouTube, but the specific way I see my ten-year-old and his friends use it. They don't watch the entire video. They don't let the tension build to the funny part, or wait while baby Charlie hams it up for the camera before biting his brother’s finger again. Instead, these ten-year-olds zoom through the videos, looking for the most exciting part, and if they don't find it within five seconds, they move onto another video. If Elijah has his iPad for fifteen minutes, he can "watch" over 100 YouTube videos.

            And I make every effort not to witness this phenomenon, for if I do, it brings on an existential dread.

            Kids these days!

           But…this same kid devours books cover-to-cover, several every week. He will happily watch a movie all the way through if he's watching with us, or Maebh, or anyone else who approaches screens, um, traditionally. (Traditionally? Holy crow, I’m 800 years old.)  He’s much better at conversing with adults than I was at his age. He and his friends will sit and fold origami or solve a rubics cube for hours; he listens to the radio for fun; he follows recipes when he's cooking. He cooks! And he slows down for dogs in a way that's both invisible and unmistakable, both instinctive and profound. I’ve lost count of the number of times an unknown neighbor on our block says something like "she's usually shy with strangers!" about a dog that was climbing into Elijah's lap.

            In other words, these ten-year-olds’ preferred screen time habits don't reveal some underlying inability to follow a train of thought, or to engage meaningfully with a story, or to be patient. My existential dread is entirely illogical. But...kids these days! What’s going to happen when we all die, and the world is being run by people who prefer to watch five seconds of various YouTube videos for thirty straight minutes instead of one solid episode of television?

            My god, how did I get this old? 

            I find this thought particularly distressing because I like kids. Cliche for someone like me, yes, but also true. I find kids fascinating. And I like all kids, every age of kids, every kind of kids, even the ones you could call "little assholes." Assholery in a little person makes them even more interesting to me. Earlier in my adulthood, I simply trusted kids to carry out life in the future just a little better than we're managing to in the present. I don't want this existential dread!

            The other day at dinner, I was telling Elijah a story about something that happened to me in elementary school. I guess he found it interesting because he said, "So would that be a part of your documentary?"

            "What?" I said. "What documentary?"

            Because of Elijah’s screen-time habits, detailed above, I didn’t realize he’d ever seen a documentary. I was surprised he knew what a documentary was.

            "When they make one about your life," he clarified. "That story will be in it."

            I had about four seconds to feel a lot of feelings: shock, flattery, confusion, humility, love.

            Then, he followed it up with: "Oh, wait. Never mind. It's too late, right?"

            Before he added this last part, a lot of questions were half-forming in my brain. But I skipped all of those and went straight to,

            "Too late? What do you mean too late?"

            He shrugged. "I just mean, you've already done all the interesting stuff."

          I held back the laugh that tempts adults when bighearted kids are so innocently and accidentally rude. I pressed pause on the fact that here was my son echoing the sentiment from my first newsletter: forty-plus-year-old women are not the subject of documentaries (or anything else). Because this was turning into one of the conversations that I want to poke and prod and until it unwinds to reveal something dear and precious about who my kid is and the way he thinks. A snapshot of Elijah-At-Ten.

            I asked him, "When did I stop being interesting?"

            He thought about it for a moment, but answered definitively. "College."

            "What?" I yelped.

            "Mom, no one is interesting after college."

            "Hm," I said. "What if someone doesn't go to college?"

            This time he didn't even pause. "Then, high school, or whatever other school they do after."

            So, it's school. School is what makes someone interesting. But I wasn't sure he realized this implied definition.

            "Well, I find your observations very interesting," I said.

            He laughed. "That's because I'm WAY younger than college."

            I left that conversation weirdly happy. Kids are like oysters, and these thoughts are like pearls. They solidify slowly. They roll around and around in the perital and occipital lobes, bumping up against the rough edges of the barley-forming frontal lobe, until they become something hidden and solid. And temporary. Something kids won’t give you freely, not because they don't want you to have it, but because they don't realize it is something to give. A piece of them you'll miss if you don't have time that day to sit and slowly coax open the oyster. I'm fascinated by these pearls in any child, but when I pull one out of my own kids, I hoard it in an ornate jewelry box of memories.

Now. This particular pearl was technically pretty insulting, but I didn’t care. And even though I knew ultimately it was important for Elijah to realize that people of all ages can be interesting, I tucked it into my pocket. I didn't push back.

            I didn't say...

            So, is Dad boring forever now too?

            Or

            Have you ever heard of Kamala Harris? Pretty sure you’d agree that she managed to do some interesting things post-college.

            Or even

            So...school is what makes someone interesting? You do know I JUST went back to school, right?

            I guess, even as I rail against fading into the background in general, I'll happily take my place in the background for Elijah. I guess, he's the exception. I guess, I actually want him to see me as boring.

            Because what can be better, when you're ten, then a boring mom?

            And because, if the stars of the world are people in school, that means they’re people like him. I’ll take the background in this imaginary documentary, so that he can star. And, dang, that’s how it should be.

            Plus, he really wasn’t trying to offend me. I mean, he followed it up with, right? Like he was saying "Avocado is a fruit, right?" or "Your birthday is in May, right?”

"Oh, wait. Never mind. It's too late, right?"

            He thought my boringness was a scientific fact. And that's because he's the star. And he should be. But it's a position he shares with everyone in school. It's a position I see him share with Meabh, and with every one of his friends, and with my friends' kids, and with his classmates, and with any kid who happens to be on the playground at the same time as him.

            And when I think about Elijah both owning center stage obviously and sharing it generously, I don't really care if that stage is showing a chaotic collage of YouTube clips.

            Maybe I'm hard-wired to feel some sort of dread about the way kids interact with YouTube. Maybe it’s the part of the biological clock that no one talks about.

            But, if I really think about kids these days, I'm filled not with dread, but with its opposite. Kids these days actually fill me with hope.

            Especially that kid.  

FUN STUFF

News!

I’m joining the staff at Gotham Writers Workshop and will be teaching Writing For Children Level 1 starting next week! Despite the fact that I like every kid I’ve ever met, and I DO NOT like every adult I’ve ever met, I actually love teaching adults and I’m so excited to meet a whole new crop of writers!

What I’m looking for:

1. (Still hoping for more answers to this one! I have a few and they are fascinating, and feeling very relevant to the many school decisions we need to make this year.) What would you learn if you could learn anything in the world?

2. Keep the recs coming for books, TV shows, movies, etc that star or heavily feature women over 39! We gotta make that list a little longer!

   My recommendations:

Reading: Another powerful article I read for school. I’m dying for someone to discuss this one with.

Listening: You know who else is middle-aged now? The Girls Next Door! And they have a podcast where they tell the truth behind that fluffy reality show, and it’s both easy listening and fascinating. Especially if, like me, you’re interested in pulling the curtain back on the 90s/00s right now. It’s called Girls Next Level.

Doing: Treat yourself to some new socks. In no other way can $1.75 feel like such luxury. My toes are thanking me as I type.