Confession: I learned about Gangnam Style from my six-year-old son. I also learned he was under the impression that “sexy” is a bad word that must mean somebody is stupid. Don’t worry, I fixed that in a nice, age-appropriate way.
It’s not good, though, that it has come to this: learning about pop culture sensations through my children. (He also tipped me off about the Cookie Monster spoof of “Call Me Maybe.”) I mean, it feels like I’m on the internet all the time and he doesn’t even have a clock radio in his room. The truth is that he has a class full of peers at school and that I mostly just use the internet to write and keep up with emails and messages while taking care of three kids and a perpetual mountain of laundry.
Of course, not knowing about Gangnam Style is just symptomatic of a more pervasive ignorance. I’m out of it, people. I really am. I was never the most cutting edge music or culture geek that I knew — but, then again, I knew a lot of geeks. But I was, generally, aware of what was out there and what I liked and what kinds of things I would probably like.
Then I became a mom. (I became a mommy blogger, no less, which leads to the assumption that I have a deep and persistent desire to make food shaped like animals and write endlessly about laundry detergent. You should read Australian “mummy blogger” Eden Riley’s take on that at Edenland if you haven’t already.) I became a mom and suddenly lost interest in anything that didn’t directly relate to caring for my child. Wait a second.
No, it was more like how your body shuts down during a crisis and the most essential functions are given priority. Or it’s like when you’re working the floor by yourself on a Sunday evening and the entire restaurant fills up at once because of the mid-summer theatre festival around the corner that nobody thought about. You forget about refilling water glasses and bussing empty tables and keeping the bar tidy or pushing fancy cocktails. One by one, all the extraneous tasks fall to the wayside and you get a kind of tunnel vision. If you can just get all the orders in and the food out, keep moving and keep a running tally of things to do next, you might make it through the night alive.
Babies are like that. They are all encompassing and incredibly time consuming. Now that I think about it, I’ve been living in crisis mode for years. I’ve been the full-time/primary caregiver to my one, then two and now three children while working part-time from home and occasionally, you know, moving into a house without a kitchen or being incapacitated by a seriously messed up pregnant pelvis or otherwise dealing with whatever massive obstacle life throws my way.
So you start shedding the excess. First-run movies are the first to go, followed by any kind of movie or book or series of anything that’s going to require some sort of commitment to narrative on my part. Next goes newspapers and magazines and any music that’s not already loaded onto my iPod that I can’t find most of the time anyways or playing on the car radio. The radio is NOT, by the way, a reliable source for any music that’s worth listening to. Then the rest drops off: online articles and blogs, anything to do with fashion, and even TV. Next thing you know you’re only left with Facebook and that is not a good place to be.
I just took a break from writing this to read Kate Carraway on The Atlantic Wire’s Media Diet column. She was listing all the different magazines she regularly buys and wrote that, “Once a year I buy a cooking or decorating magazine and then remember I am way too young and cool to be doing that. Juuust kidding. No I’m not.” Seriously! It doesn’t even have to do with age, it has to do with interest. I need to stop buying into the myth that my tastes and interests are supposed to have limitations just because I’m somebody’s mother.
I’d much rather spend two hours reading literature or insightful journalism or watching a good movie or listening to good music than baking precious birthday princess cupcakes for my daughter. And I don’t think that makes me a crappy mom either. It may even make me a good one.
Now that Mary is over 13 months old and my head is emerging from it’s postpartum haze, I feel like I have the energy to do that. I’m ready to dive back into culture, especially music. But I need your help. Where do I start? What do I read? The new Helen Spitzer-penned Bunch Family #dadrock column is a start, but I need more. More leads, please, and they don’t even have to aimed at moms either.
Thank you! If I start to become cool again, maybe I’ll even start sharing some tidbits on this blog.