Anticipation

Two more nights until opening night. I’m pretty nervous, even though I know I shouldn’t be. I guess I’m having my usual pre-event “nobody’s going to show up this year!” freak out. It’ll pass. Somebody will show up. Right??

Friday night the kids and I went to an “Astronomy Night” at B’s school. What I was picturing was a group of kids sitting nicely while someone in charge gave a lecture on astronomy and let the kids look through telescopes. What actually happened was a large group of screaming kids clambering around playground equipment in the pitch black night while socially awkward older men from the Astronomy Society tried to prevent small children from getting nose prints and peanut butter fingers on their expensive lenses. It was so exhausting managing the boys’ intense energy and chasing them around in the dark that by the time I got home and wrestled everyone into pajamas I wanted to collapse. Ah, parenting.

Earlier that day was Bobby’s first time with the after school chess club. For this I had to pick him up after school and walk him to the lunch area to meet with the group. As soon as he saw the group, which mostly consisted of much older kids, he started crying and saying he didn’t want to go. As with all parents in moments like this, I started my usual routine of begging, coddling, threatening and guilt tripping to get him to relent and go to the club. In the end, what worked? The promise of a blue frosting-covered donut afterwards. Ha ha ha! He is his mother’s son. Sure enough, when I picked him up an hour later he was totally into it and can’t wait to go back. I delivered the blue donut. We were both happy.

How do we raise violin-playing, chess-playing children in this day and age when everything is iPads and video games? Am I just a dinosaur that has pseudo-intellectual fantasies of raising pretentious Luddite children? Am I handicapping them by not allowing them to be constantly inundated by technology, like everyone else? Am I trying to teach them skills that don’t even matter anymore in this digital age? I feel like I want to protect their innocence; but what’s most likely really going on there is a projection of my own childhood obsession with being innocent and aloof (the roots of which would fill a novel). Oh, how these children suffer for our own emotional issues, don’t they? All they want is to play MineCraft, for fuck’s sake.