Go Daddy

In which John Minichillo ponders the introvert online parents and the needs of their social child.

_________________________________________________________

NASHVILLE-

My wife and I are writers, and we love the Internet. Our relationship got better when we started using Twitter. We’ll post 140-character jokes throughout the day that technically go to our measly cast of followers, but for me at least, @Katrina_Gray is @TheSnowhale’s most outstanding follower. I’m laughing to myself sometimes as I tweet one out, and I know she’ll probably get a chuckle too.

We weren’t always this way. My wife was first to get on Facebook, and she implored me to pay attention to how the writers I was reading online were connecting with each other, and I should come join in the fun.

Lots of writers’ websites will tell you that you need a website to promote your work, that you need to engage in social networking, but I see a lot of writers who do it wrong. If all I ever hear from you is that you wrote a blog post, so that your social accounts are really just sign posts for your other Internet activity, if your Twitter and your Facebook and your Google+ feeds are all exactly alike, or if you don’t have a sense of humor, then you’re there at the party, but you should be talking to people not at them. You should let yourself go and have a little fun.

Though it’s ironic for me to be talking about parties. My wife and I have a friend who started dating a guy who said he’d met us at a party. We haven’t told our friend the guy she’s dating is a liar, because we go to parties about as much as we have children, which is one whopper of a boy about three years ago.

He is a wonderful human being and we love him to death, but he really needs our attention and so he dictates the parameters of our writing time. My novel, The Snow Whale, was largely written while our son was small enough to prop up in a playpen next to my computer.  We spent many hours like that. These days, he’s walking and talking, and the computer is a source of entertainment for him. As much as we love spending time with him, we live for the times he goes to bed early or when he’s off at preschool.

For our son, who will be the first generation born into an Internet-permeated atmosphere, the Internet is basically a kind of on-demand video service. Our iPhones are little TVs that can also play games, so that he can fulfill his desire to watch a Lego Star Wars video, another kid’s homemade Thomas the Tank Engine video, or a cartoon with a dancing skeleton. YouTube and Netflix can be played on the laptop or on the TV with our Roku player, and to him, the variation in size and personal proximity of the screens is a big part of the fun.

My wife and I have had very little success writing while our son is cognizant and stomping around without one of us holing up in a room while the other guards the door. It’s always temporary, is as much a drag on the other spouse as it is on the child, and so it’s a tactic only rarely employed. My naive belief that I could write on an iPad with a Bluetooth Zaggmate keyboard, and that the supreme portability of the iPad would counteract his ability to distract my writing, only gave him an even better device on which to watch Youtube and play games.

We battle with the TV. PBS Kids broadcasts commercial-free cartoons all day long. It is undeniable that more than an hour or so of this at once is detrimental to his mood and most likely bad for his development. But the TV and the videos can buy me a little time, so it’s pretty tempting. I saw somewhere that Maxine Hong Kingston admitted in her memoir to leaving her young son alone with an entire bag of marshmallows for the sake of the short burst of writing time it allowed her. And my wife and I identify with that.

But to be honest, I’m more likely tuning my son out more than he tunes me out, and not because of writing, but because of the pull of the social networking sitesthat I can so easily access on all the devices my son also covets. He needs my attention, and he craves the instant gratification of fulfilling the whims of his video desires. And my wife and I, we crave the instant gratification of interacting with the other writers out there, people we really like, who may not even know we really like them — most of whom we’ve never met, many of whom are also dealing with somehow raising small children in this charged atmosphere.

I suspect there are no secrets to navigating the social sites that have permeated our real social lives, and I wish all the other parents luck. I see people declare they are going offline for a few days, and I spend my own time away, sickened or fatigued from the constant feed. But then, I’ll want folks to know about something that happened to me related to my writing, or I’ll want to tell someone I’ve never met happy birthday, or someone out there will direct me to a really great article, and so it goes. And there’s no turning back.

My wife and I have a need to socialize that can be fulfilled with the people online. Our son’s can’t. My wife and I also have the desire to be alone with our writing, which is what we see as our life’s work. Our son doesn’t.

There’s no doubt his form of socializing is more rewarding, and that he’s gotten us out of our shells more. His experience of life is more direct, and as he continues to charge toward the original sin of language acquisition, his paradise will be lost. One day we’ll probably be nostalgic for this time, when he didn’t know the social sites were out there waiting for him.

And one day, I suspect, even before he can drive, I’ll be following my son on Twitter too. It won’t take any prodding and it will most likely come naturally to him.

He’ll garner a slew of followers, and he’ll tell the best jokes.