The Device Provides
At a motel swimming pool in Albuquerque, summer 1980-something, my sister and I dove for pennies. Later, when we were bored with that, we searched for floating ice cubes.
These were the games our father invented while sunbathing on the pool deck. He wasn’t much of swimmer, though he did enjoy tanning and throwing pocket change and ice cubes from his drink at us.
Those were the simple motel vacations of summer, and we loved them.
In the spring, we went on hikes at 7,000 feet in the Santa Fe National Forest, or spent time on pebbly river beaches.
Winter time we went to the indoor pool and splashed around, my dad sitting somewhere. Reading? Not sure exactly what he was doing. In those days, there weren’t cell phones or lap tops. No scrolling or squeezing in some after dinner computer work.
Such was my youth, where my father didn’t have to compete with technology to keep us entertained. Nowadays, with me in the father’s seat, I have to physically extract my children from our home in order to get them away from the screen.
I still resort to hotel stays and movies and museums, along with all the attractions my adopted California city now provides. Theme parks, beaches, bays, mega malls, zoos, aquariums, parks galore, and enough hiking, biking, and swimming to last a lifetime.
And yet, they opt for their iPads. It’s just part of life, and I’m understanding that. I’m accepting it. I’m almost at peace with it.
There’s this account I follow on Instagram called Wonder Dads. It provides ideas for dads looking to keep their kids busy. The page is always asking “what will you do today,” or some underhanded challenge question like that. It’s a subscription page, too, that will provide you with even more ideas and suggestions aimed at enjoying the time with your kids while they’re still kids.
I see this page, and I love the intent, but I know my kids. And I know me. The wonder has faded. They have everything they will ever need, and I offer it to them every day, several times a day, but sometimes–most of the time–the machine wins.
Their idea of wonder is now fully integrated into a digital experience created by some game developer. A fun day for my sons is never leaving the house. Never setting foot outside, because, why would you when the device provides everything?
Most of my dad friends go through the same thing. We simultaneously hold the world on our shoulders and juggle as many activities as we can possibly manage in order to keep our children connected to the natural world. The human world.
Is it our futile aspiration to be so-called Wonder Dads ourselves, or is it penance for putting the screen in front of our children in the first place?
It’s certainly both for me.
My hope lies in a piece of sage wisdom my friend Peter provided a while back. He reminded me that I’ve already done my job. My children already see the man they might become in the way I lead my life.
I pray he’s right.
I pray that when my sons see me up at dawn going for a walk or coming from the gym, then making them a full breakfast and sitting down to eat that breakfast with them, then getting ready for work, dropping them off a school, picking them up, then whisking them all around town to uphold that wonder, that they see what it was all for. I hope that they one day unglue themselves from their electronic appendage and fall back in love with the mother that supports us all. Earth.
I hope that they know how to be wonderful men on said earth, and maybe one day, if they are lucky, become models of manliness for their own children, for those future sons that will forge the new way forward.
This would be a wonderful outcome, and at this point, it’s the one aspiration I can cling to. It’s what keeps me young as they grow up right before my eyes, becoming who they will be, one day at a time.
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Photo by Derek Thomson on Unsplash
