Video games aren’t to blame
It’s Sunday. The boys disappeared a while ago. It turns out they’ve been entertaining each other for hours. We just noticed.
Today is the first day in 3 and a half years we caught a break without sending them off to the paid village of childcare land.
Is this a new chapter for us?
So, the boys are in the basement, playing together. Well, they’re playing Minecraft together. Not the most widely approved parenting tactic out there. We’re doing our best.
The TV is in the basement by design. In our first house, we put our sole TV in the finished basement hoping the hoards of visiting cousins would hang out downstairs, leaving the adults alone on the main level to talk about adult things without interruption or the risk of poisoning tiny ears.
In most adult conversations, though, we end up talking about our kids.
Anyway.
We created the same TV arrangement in our current house. Moving into a much smaller house with an unfinished basement, we prioritized refinishing it above our Pepto Bismol pink bathrooms and Formica countertops. Because adult conversations.
After a 2-week contractor project that stretched into 3 months of hell, it was done. (The guiding light through the excruciating process was being able to banish the kids to a comfortable room with clean, freshly painted drywall and dimmable lighting, after all.)
So today, the boys are down there. Chortles of laughter float up the stairs. I hear gentle guidance from Beans to Ziggy on which buttons to mash in order to kill the zombies. Some talk about butts and farts. More unbridled guffaws.
Every parent will face this day. The first day that the kids entertain themselves for a few interrupted hours.
Parents facing this day blink into the quiet abyss. Exchanging confused blinks with one another. And then those parents will return to their doom-scrolling, lest the magical moment ends in a flash.
This is the first time that we get a break.
Newborns are hazards to their own health and can’t feed themselves or even sit up straight. They need us for survival.
Toddlers’ life energy comes to a peak and it shoots out of their eyes and greasy fingers every waking minute of every day. They demand attention at every moment.
Pre-K power forces you under their intelligent tests of control. Before you know it, you’re wiping your 3-year old’s butt because he swears he can’t do it by himself even though he’s done it a dozen times this past week.
But as soon as the smallest hits Pre-K, he’s more independent than ever before. The older one—even more so.
Freedom Day. It first happened to us on Saturday.
This game of “let’s see how long the kids entertain themselves” then rolled into Sunday.
In my mind, I shoot 10 years into the future. They’re teenagers, but they’re zombies. They’re zombies because I left them to fend for themselves for a decade with a Nintendo Switch and a wifi connection and frozen pizza from Trader Joe’s. At least it’s organic. I approach their adult-sized bodies in a slow-motion haze, the backs of their hoodies wrapped around their heads, a dreamlike fog emanating from the glowing rectangles in the basement. I’m just about to see what must be their black, vacant eyes of teenhood.
Then, suddenly I’m zapped back to midday Sunday. The little one stands in the doorway with his sparkly eyes and alarmingly charismatic smile, taking in the scene of his seated and quiet parents as the video game dopamine clears from his head. Beans emerges, too. It’s feeding time.
We choose (yet another) frozen pizza, making a mental note to offer them healthier options next week.
As the boys give in to their human needs of food and water, we realize that all they really want is us. In nurturing them back from robot children to human children with eye-to-eye communication and interaction, they seek more tickles and wrestling matches and hugs. All the hugs.
This weekend showed me this is a new chapter. The days of them being relentless forces of noise pollution and snack demands are disappearing. In this new chapter, we need to lean into them, before they turn into zombie-robot teenagers.
I’ll show up as a Good Parent this week. I’ll offer them trips to the free library, a beach trip on their day off, play dates, museum visits, and undistracted playtime. Infinite hugs.
