Confessions of a Terrible Mother

on raising kids in a world gone mad

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Welcome to the Unbusy Revolution.

I think I read and watched too much sci-fi as a kid.

Actually, I don’t think there’s such a thing as too much sci-fi. But I’m starting to wonder if there is such a thing as too much science fiction when it comes to the correlation between pages read and fitness (or not) for modern motherhood.

Because today, I found myself standing in the kitchen trying to explain to my 13 year old why I don’t want him going to the newest virtual reality video-game place.

How do you draw a line for a child from his best friend’s birthday party to the fact that the Supreme Court just basically made the President king?

How can you tell a child, without telling them that the world is completely fucked up? That you don’t want to normalize escaping into some illusory, dopamine-drenched world, cause the real one is on fire and is gonna need him?

How do we navigate all this heavy shit as parents without being total assholes?

I know, I know. You’re probably thinking - Girl, it’s just a kid’s birthday party. Get over it.

But is it?

Where does ‘just a party’ become a new social norm? And how do we stop fucked up things becoming normal if we agree to engage in them, even when we know they’re shit for our kids?

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I came of age astride the digital divide.

I grew up listening to records, yes vinyl and no, not in some vaguely ironic, hipster way. I didn’t have a cell phone until my mid-20s. I survived my teenage years without documenting every fucking second of it online. I learned to sit patiently while the dial-up modem schreached to life. We used pay phones and talked to boys on a landline, dragging the cord to our bedroom from the kitchen and we survived.

We survived all of it.

And yet, despite that, despite my friends all being of the same generation of long phone cords and dial-up and boredom and patience . . . Whenever I raise my concerns, the collective guilt - of disappointing my child or causing him to miss out - is laid on thick.

(We had disappointment back then, too, by the way. Also didn’t die.)

Maybe I’m being alarmist. Maybe I’m just a modern incarnation of the same moral hysteria of the Reading Panic of the 1700s.

By the sounds of it, there was plenty of 18th century-style pearl-clutching over concerns that young people, in particular, would get lost in the books that were suddenly widely available in small, portable and affordable forms.

But is Gothe really analogous to our modern fixations?

I recently had this debate with my hubby, whom spends far too much time, imho, on TikTok. I worry that the rapidly shifting manipulative algos of media like TikTok or YouTube prime us for distorted thinking, bringing us further away from our ability to know our own minds.

He countered that I read a ton of books - don’t those books also carry bias and modes of thinking set out to influence my own?

Here’s the thing - yes, absolutely, each author comes with their own bias and goals and desire to influence in some way their readers. But when I pick up a book :

a) I know who the author is.

I can understand who they are, what their motives might be, what their bias or thought-orientation is. I might know about their political beliefs, their religion, their employer, their financial backers.

I have the opportunity to CHOOSE the source of my information when I pick up a book. Because I know who has brought these words into being, I can actively decide before I consume it, whether or not I want to let that information into my consciousness.

This choice, to decide what we do or do not consume, is one that we are rapidly relinquishing to massively powerful, intentionally opaque corporations. (The farmer in me is keen to point out that this is as true of food as it is of information - and many of the same people are trying to control both. Bill Gates, I’m lookin’ at you.)

b) As I read that book, the content remains fixed and constant.

It receives no feedback from me, even if I fill it’s margins with notes and dog-ear every corner, it remains blissfully ignorant of my thoughts. It cannot peek into my brain, noting how I linger over a particular passage or race through another. There is no split-second measurement of outrage or titillation or joy or perturbation. The book remains inert, despite me.

The content of the third page does not change based on how I feel about the second. The third page remains constant and true and doesn’t give a damn how I feel about it, how long I read the page before it and whether or not it might make me angry.

Can I lose myself in it? Sure. Might it change my thinking or my view of the world or myself? Gosh, I hope so! Can it actively manipulate me in real time? Absolutely not.

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Ok, so truth time. Maybe these stupid games DO take me straight to The Matrix and nightmares of all those souls encased in jelly and illusion.

And maybe that is extreme. Maybe not.

But more the more urgent, less neurotic, question is -

Is this how we want to teach our kids to live their one wild and precious life?

There is a great, wide world out there that urgently needs our attention. And not just in some tragic, end-of-the-world way, either.

My life as a farmer has put me on the front lines of climate change in a concrete, immediate way. What the world needs isn’t climate warriors destroying our most treasured creative heritage. What it needs is millions of souls awake to their own lives. Who are present and rooted in their particular time and place. Who have the capacity to look up from the screens that shout everywhere for our attention and simply - notice.

Both my great loves, farming and art, have been lifelong lessons in seeing. Not just looking, but learning how to see.

How to be fully present with intellect and intuition and some vestige of my ancient heart that has no name, in order to commune with and understand the world around and within me.

To know and to understand the world around and within one, to lay claim to the truth that they are one and the same . . . one cannot accomplish this without also falling in love. Love for our places, for our communities - even ourselves. This is how we move forward. This is how we lean into the rudder to shift course. Not kicking and screaming, but quietly, deliberately, persistently - loving, listening, seeing, nourishing, stewarding, healing.

This requires attention. Presence. Not being buried in sea of distraction, in dopamine and bloody zombies.

I want my children to experience their lives - in the real world.

I watch so many of their friends whose lives unfold nearly exclusively through mediums mediated and controlled by corporations. Their blank faces lit up by the blue light of the screen; even when in the same room as their friends they sit squashed on our old couch, everyone withdrawn into his own illusion.

Except mine. Because mine doesn’t have a tiny blue box of dopamine and illusion to disappear into.

Which, apparently, is what makes me a terrible mother.

In the end, I let him go to the stupid party.

(See, I AM a terrible mother.)

I sat him down at the kitchen table and harangued him with why this wasn’t healthy or normal or something to make normal. Just like fast food, this was about mainlining dopamine and distraction. Once wasn’t gonna kill you, but it would eventually if you made it a habit.

We talked about the state of democracy and the truth of these corporations and their goals, and why his mother was so neurotic over his best-friend’s choice of birthday celebration. We talked about the difference between being a citizen and being a consumer, and how both our politicians and our powerful corporations would prefer we choose the later.

We talked about the way his buddies - who live their lives through their screens - don’t know how to notice if a calf is sick, or how to fix the lawnmower, or how to grow or harvest food or walk in the woods quietly. How to have a conversation with strangers or shake a man’s hand with confidence and warmth.

In the end, I was truthful.

I told him the world around him is hurting, and needs young people who know how to care for their families and neighbours, tend sick animals and restore abused soil. Young people who know how to speak truth to power and who will stand up for what they believe in, who believe in something, anything real. Who know how to pay attention to the things that really matter. Who understand that when a product is ‘free’, YOU are the product.

And then I gave him a hug and told him I trust him and how we’ve raised him and sent him out into that strange and violent and superficial world.

And maybe, as imperfect parents in this ailing world, that’s the best we can hope to do.

Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.

-William Martin

Stacey Langford is a writer, renegade farmer and slow business mentor living and working in Canada’s Fraser Valley. In 2010 Stacey ditched her cubicle in the city to turn her attention homeward, farm and help others craft a simple life, from scratch.