Family Time
or The Push And Pull Of The Real And Digital World
If you are a regular or if you have landed on Tarantula: Authors and Art welcome. This year, we hope that our stories as well as the artists that we feature will inspire you to start your own creative journey, and our house team of writers will join you on this ride. This July, our inspiration is Croatian artist Maša Barišić. And today’s reflexion was written by our reader Lidia Oshlyansky, who just might become one of our regular house writers.
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Endless days filled with sunshine, warmth and family. Trips down the road to the lake for a swim. A drive over to the “självplock” to pick strawberries and an evening spent gorging on them as well as making them into jam. Friends over for dinner on the deck looking over the fields and forests, watching the sun slowly wane into sunset and an endless dusk. This is summer in Stockholm for me. Being outside as much as we can be and getting enough sunshine and warmth to last us through the winter.
I’ve lived away from my family for 20 years now. First the UK, now Sweden. They come to me in Sweden every July and my son and I go in the winter or autumn. It’s a time for family and friends, a time for tight bonds to be renewed and new memories to be created. It’s not that we do much on these visits, we simply “do together” and it is wonderful and exhausting.
It’s also time for my son to be with his cousin so that they can play, have fun, connect and frustrate each other in equal measures. By quirk of family my sister’s grandson and my son are just six months apart. My sister is significantly older and had a child early in life who in turn had a child in her late 20s. I had a child late. The boys are close as can be especially given the 7000 kilometres distance and seven hours time difference.
They will happily sit and stare at screens all day and to them they are bonding, creating memories and spending time together. I shout at them to get outside, play a board game, go build something with the endless supply of lego, draw, do puzzles, paint, run, play, bloody anything other than screens; anything I consider to be more “bonding” and enriching activities. They grumpily comply and within an hour they are back on some screen or another. “Just let us do this one more thing mama.”
I remember the arguments with my own parents when I wanted to watch cartoons after school and on Saturday mornings. My father got so frustrated with my screen time habits that he began disconnecting the antenna from the TV and later the cable. It didn’t take me long to figure out how to reconnect them and sneak TV time anyway. It’s only now that I reflect that he was worried in the same way I am. The boys on the other hand aren’t worried, they are building their bonds in their own way.
My brother-in-law nudges, “Let them be for goodness sake, it’s their generation, they are different, we didn’t have this.” He is of course right, we didn’t have this. I grew up not playing video games unless it was at a video arcade or at a friend’s house who was lucky enough to have had an Atari console. I grew up with Atari being the cool new thing. I do worry a lot about the amount of time on the screen, about the disconnection from the physical world and the immersion into the digital world. Are they removing themselves from the sunshine, the warmth, the breeze would they rather be inside playing Minecraft instead of outside picking and eating raspberries? And just for a second as I hear them outside kicking the ball around, practising goalkeeping, laughing, making up new “moves” and new game rules, I hope they want both. But that’s quickly interrupted.
“Auntie LIdia come take a video so I can send it to my mom” yells my great nephew.
“Mama, do it again with me in goal” says my son.
The digital and the real mixing again.
There is a part of me that also blames myself for it. I’ve spent most of my adult life working in tech, I’ve never built video games but some of my nearest and dearest have. Like so many other gen X parents, I often find myself dependent on that kid-screen time as a carrot, a stick and a babysitter. Maša Barišić’s art spoke to me at the exact right moment. With my family here spending time with me and my son, with the boys drawn to the screens and the adults trying to draw them away. With the constant push and pull of the real and digital world, I often find myself wondering what the screen time will mean in the long term. I’m not sure Bugs Bunny or the Smurfs did me any long lasting harm (or any good). I’m fairly sure that the romance novels I read later as a teen did far more damage. Like Maša’s work portrays, it’s in the afterparty (much later in life) where we take a breath and reflect.
My guess is that the boys will be just fine, even with that extra hour of Minecraft under their belt, but it doesn’t mean I wont keep trying to get them outside. They’re building their own kind of memories. They will look back to gorging on ripe berries in sunshine, swimming in the lake, jumping off the rocks into the cool water and their own preferences of Minecraft world building and laughing at silly YouTube clips. I will accept that their childhood memories will be different from mine, made with different building blocks and hopefully full of happiness.
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