I live in an odd little academic world full of quirky workaholic bibliophiles and the erudite. It's not enough to call us nerds, or what the French term "binoclards." Most of the single academics I call friends are like protozoa and are more likely to multiply through spontaneous cell division than with actual person-to-person contact. After eight years of college I know that had I attempted to marry and conceive children after earning my degree, I'd be introduced at parties as the "handsome spinster."
My kids can look at my bookshelves and know how close they came to never existing. I used to be cool, but then I went to college. Through my studies, I've lost my ability to endure small talk at parties. I know librarians by their first names, and I can't pass a bookstore without breaking into an addict's sweat. Worse, I can't answer questions without offering a "problematizing" line of inquiry that allows for those not represented by or in a text:
"Mom, what's a rhetorical silence?"
"Well, that depends. To you mean as a deliberate rhetorical strategy or one that is imposed? Because even silences are political and you have to consider the context ..."
"Am I adopted? Please tell me I'm adopted."
For a bunch of allegedly worthless English studies junkies, the people in my family work with a lot of scientific theory: Teenager in motion remains in motion until an imbalanced force (otherwise known as mom) is exerted upon her. My teenager proves Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: I can know her position or momentum, but never both at the same time - no matter how many times I call her cell phone.
There's some sort of string theory connecting my daughter's happiness to my wallet. Road trips can and do stretch the time/space continuum because both are affected by car conversation, topic gravity or the driver. When I take us to the store, we get there quickly. When my just-learning-to-drive daughter is at the wheel, I age one year per mile. I know I'm going to look like Yoda by the time that kid gets her license.
Uptight coronary candidate I am.
Though my kids prefer to think of me as the epicenter of all nerd activity, I'm really just the source of the outbreak. Laurie Anderson was right: "Language is a virus," and my kids have raging cases. My son loves Shakespeare, and I mean the sort of love that comes from immediately understanding the rhythm of verse. One Christmas, he was more excited to get a Shakespeare anthology than he was to get a video game. Even in my world that's a bit off.
My eldest daughter paints abstract representations of language and relationships, big beautiful experiments even Jackson Pollock would puzzle. Our youngest is the captain of her speech team and can talk at great length without breathing. Even so, despite our shared enthusiasm for language and intellectual pursuits, we've somehow lost sight of each other.
In the last two days, both of my grown children and the one still living at home have expressed a hurting, a burr in their conscious thoughts. They've each come to me in their own way, with their own words, and let me know that this thinking work I do and inspire isn't as important as being a family.
To bring that Star Wars metaphor full circle: "There's been a disturbance in The Force."
I don't know if other families are experiencing this shift in happiness, but our clan is a bit worn-down by money issues and matters of time. We're always running from one job or activity to the next, living our lives in a full sprint, slowing down only moments before bed so we can pop up the next morning and do it all again. As my eldest daughter sat in my office Monday afternoon, telling me about her life, I realized I was missing it. I was missing her.
It's strange how you can live with or near those you love and still miss them, still set them aside so you can rush off to campus to toil at intellectual labor. Curtis White, a professor at the University of Illinois Regent Ferlic wouldn't write home about, refers to this American dynamic as "the culture of total work." White, in his critique of how language is used against us in capitalist culture, posits that groupthink is like a big fat pillow. Because everyone is out there working like dogs, because anything of value must produce a profit, most believe there's something inarguably noble about working. We can't criticize it. We can't resist it, either. "You don't need to think," White writes, "Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and critical faculties, but it's very comfortable."
But deep down, for families like mine, the "culture of total work" isn't working. We're missing out on each other, and we're missing out on love. Time is always borrowed, we're all temporal creatures. It's not that we won't or don't work - but it shouldn't be all we do. We have responsibilities to each other to nurture and encourage, to listen and to talk - to be a family. As I listened to my adult daughter, I realized I hadn't led by example. I had to get off my cushion. So I asked her, "Want to come home for supper? I'll be home by 6:30."
"Can I borrow some Kerouac?"
"Nerd."
"I love you."
"Yeah, Mom, I love you too."
ERICa f. rogers is a third year ph.d student of english. she can be reached at opinion@dailynebraskan.com
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