Attention Deficit Disorder

So Rainer and I went to the zoo today with friends. Søren asked why Rainer was getting to have all the good times and I answered that four weekdays out of five, the highlight of Rainer’s day was getting to walk to school to pick his brothers up from school, so let’s not go trying to tally up who’s having the better childhood.

Not the point. The point, actually, is that the more time I spend at the zoo, the less I like people. I hope T., the friend we went with, wasn’t too put off by how completely misanthropic I was by the time we left the place — in fact, I think one of the secrets of our friendship’s success is that she was pretty similarly frustrated by the same things I was. What I saw that I had never seen before was mothers pushing strollers, strollers laden with preschool-aged children, too, not just preverbal infants, through the zoo while chatting on their cell phones. And I wavered between compassion for how exhausting and isolating just BEING with your kids can be, knowing I am in no position to judge, and being sort of angry on these kids behalf, that somehow the kids are getting a sort of obligatory pretense at a good time, with a person who isn’t even willing to take the time to talk to them. It seemed like being on a nightmare date with somebody you really like who brings along a friend to talk to instead of paying attention to you.

I am married to an iPhone guru and love my iPhone. I love all the things the technology can do for us, love the feeling of being connected and being able to check my email throughout the day without having to touch my computer. Lately, though, I’ve just felt like I have to be very careful about leaving the phone turned off and put away when I am consciously being with the kids, leaving it in a different room altogether when I am practicing with them or having a meal with them so I don’t get sucked in to Twitter. I want the kids to feel like they have my attention.

The unreliable narrator and I had a conversation about the term “self-pity,” how the accusation of self-pity has a sort of emotional charge, like feeling self-pity is this huge character defect, which definitely resonates for me, to the extent that sometimes when a situation is worthy of some righteous indignation I cannot get to the point of formulating my own justifiable anger because I am so busy hating myself for being self-pitying. But I think stronger than that in my childhood was “wanting attention.”

I don’t think this was specific to family culture, just more about how I understood the world. There was something wrong with people who wanted attention, and something wrong with my own desire for attention. Good girls cleaned and mopped and waited for their fairy godmothers to recognize their virtue while their lazy and vain stepsisters spent endless energy getting ready for the ball, basking in their mother’s attention. Of course the reward for not asking for attention was unasked for attention from Prince Charming. Part of my general wigging about performing on the viola a month ago had to do with ambivalence about attention, which on the one hand can feel so good, and on the other hand can feel terribly treacherous because if you mess up everyone is going to know. But when you catch yourself as a mother thinking that your child is playing up some symptom of being sick just to get attention, you realize how messy your feelings about attention are.

I don’t have room for messy feelings about attention for my kids. One of my biggest fears about the larger family was whether each child would get the attention he needed. I am not sure I always do a perfect job at that. It’s a constant balancing act, and plays against my own need to pay attention to things I am interested in that have little to do with them. Still, I want to make sure that the message that they’re entitled to attention, that attention is not the reward for being good, it is a right in itself, that if one has to clobber me over the head and tell me that’s what he needs, that’s okay, I will find a way and find the time and give him my undivided attention. I will even try to overcome my aversion to the zoo and spend more time paying attention to how my child is experiencing these animals, which are almost storybook entities to him, and less time paying attention to that mother over there who is distractedly shushing her child so she can talk on the phone.