Spend Time With Kids

The academic year starts in less than two weeks and my life is about to get upended by 200 teenage maniacs, some familiar, many new — and I’m looking forward to it.

The more time I spend in online spaces, the more I realize that “living online” is sort of the standard thing for a lot of people. There is loneliness and the active pursuit of IRL activities. It seems like these people spend a lot of time “hacking” their own lives to make them more interactive. To forge and develop meaningful and lasting human connections. I’m not making fun of them. I just find the whole business peculiar because connecting with people seems like such low-hanging fruit to me. They’re everywhere!

After a couple of months of lurking around conversations like this, I’m really grateful my life is ordinary, and that I work in a school full of all sorts of people and pressing issues as opposed to in front of a screen alone at home. There isn’t much idle time to be lonely and depressed, and the work always matters. Working with kids is especially gratifying because they instantly express whether or not you’ve done a good job at helping them. Their bullshit radar is so sensitive, their bullhorns so loud, that there is no passive aggression or reading between the lines. You just suck.

Speaking of life hacks to feel alive, other than horrible ideas like visiting the DMV or Post Office at Christmas, I really only have one: Spend time with kids.

I don’t have biological kids and I don’t foresee having them. I never say never though. If the systems I have in place fail, or some switch gets turned on and I get pregnant, I’d probably go through with it and ride the wave as I do with most things in life. I’m not trying to maneuver life as much as many of the “life-optimization” people I’ve encountered recently. I think that’s all ultimately an illusion, and invariably life will step in and disrupt whatever systems you’ve put in place to make the most of your time. Kids are perhaps the penultimate expression of life fucking you in this way. I know this firsthand as an educator with a calendar full of appointments, but also teenagers who want to throw hot grits in people’s faces hovering around her desk all the time.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to admire people who surrender to aspects of life like children as opposed to fighting it all the time because liberation comes through form, not in spite of it. Spending time with kids is inviting liberatory chaos into your life. The same kind of chaos that characterizes love, aging, illness — really anything rooted in the most vulnerable human experiences that make us feel deeply connected to one another. I choose to spend time with kids through my work because it keeps the doors to realness in my life wide open.

I know a lot of other people who don’t have children (great!), who don’t want children (that’s fine!), but who also want nothing to do with children. That’s the part I think is weird and problematic because children inoculate you against inhumanity.

I know being around kids can be awful. I just spent the weekend with my three-year-old nephew who threw a long, high-pitched tantrum about dinosaurs and some imaginary “big cat” my sister uses as a ploy to get him to bathe and eat stuff. This all took place in a car on the 405 freeway when we couldn’t even roll the windows down. I. Get it. But watching my sister and brother-in-law wrangle this little hellion, and love and nurture him through their own continuous exhaustion made me admire them instead of thinking they’re fools for nuking the peace in their lives. (They think they’re fools. I thanked them for the job security. Also, we had an awesome time.)

We’re all so concerned with our work and creative endeavors leaving a mark on the world, the future. Our legacy!! One of the easiest marks to make if you are someone smart and accomplished, someone thoughtful and gentle, is the positive one you can leave on a kid’s life through the gift of time and attention. This is not time wasted because kids are the business of the future.

So if you’re feeling disconnected and robotic because of a life largely spent online, spend time with the kids in your world, the tiniest links in the unbreakable chain of humanity of which we are all a part.

Link Pickles 🥒

Why Children’s Books by Katherine Rundell, London Review of Books — I’m revisiting this fantastic essay on both the craft and existential purpose of children’s writing as we return to the classroom. Some of my favorite snippets that make it clear how writing/reading for kids is a very grown up concern:

In being written for those to whom the world is new and strange, for those who are without economic power, and for those who need short, sharp, bold stories, children’s literature can be a form of distillation: of what it means to hope, to fear, to yearn, distilled down and down into a piece of concentrated meaning.

Fantasy can be a bulwark against the mania of strong men and capitalist dogma, a way of laying bare the real-life fantasies that have been offered to us as actual, literal truth: rampant nationalism and war-mongering.

It all comes down​, I think, to this: a children’s book is not a luxury good. It is fundamental to our culture, to the grown-ups we become, to the society we build. If, as an adult, you become lost, children’s books stand waiting, with their distilled vision of that which can never be lost.