It’s About Making Babies!

Elizabeth Moon, in her SF book ‘Change of Commands’, makes a comment: “You don’t make good bread by making it once”, Ruth Ann said … “You make good bread by making a lot of bread.” This sounds like a recipe for life.

Gina at Cauldron Ridge Farms comments about how the neighborly and family sharing of yule goodies has stopped. Goodies like candy, fudge, cookies, and dips are no longer made, they no longer know the neighbors, and the family cooks have stopped cooking.

Cooking in general has slowed down. Long a staple of American independence and family, family cooking has always been the province of the poor and middle classes. The well to do hired cooks. Today so many of us practice affluence with ready-made meals, microwave and frozen entrees, and fast food. This takes us out of the kitchen. Allowing schools to run roughshod over our lives with ‘extracurricular’ games of violence and competition that our kids are never around long enough to watch us cook. So we forget how to work in the kitchen, we let our supplies run out or go bad, and trying to cook gets even more difficult to get started.

And we can’t teach our kids the family recipes, the family stories, or the family skills. And they cannot learn our ways of thinking, what we consider important and why, or that we care enough about them to spend time with them.

Christmas cookies. It isn’t just about fat grams and carbohydrates. It is about building families and communities, and growing up.

In my opinion.

Leah McLaren wrote article on how the computer interferes with intimate communication, and with personal communications, ‘Why online should be off limits in the bedroom‘.

I think Leah has overlooked an equally critical aspect of the problem, though. Transition time. And the focus on the hot ‘new’ distraction, computers, overlooks the traditional newspaper, TV, radio, book, magazine, and recorder. Wait, I might be the only one with a Yamaha soprano recorder next to the bed.

I know some people tend to concentrate more fully than others, and that some people multi-task more effectively. I wonder what effects these traits have on the time it takes to transition from a computer task to communicating, either intimately or otherwise.

Whether I am reading, working on the computer, or watching TV, an interruption is rude at the time. And if I don’t have a few minutes to ‘tidy up’ my thoughts, I lose some of the value of the time I just invested in a needed or wanted activity.

If I interrupt a reader, or work on the computer, then I am interrupting something like a conversation which I was taught was rude. But I also feel that it is rude and counter productive to attempt conversation with someone immediately at the completion of their task. Quite frustrating to both parties, when one wants to converse with a partner who is still distracted 10 seconds or 2 minutes later.

Some reports claim most cell phone related accidents happen in the 10 seconds after hanging up — it is the though process and conversation causing the distraction, not the device. So should we permit a transition time after closing the newspaper, magazine, book, or computer, and the time we expect to have our loved one’s attention? One minute, or three (3) minutes, before we intrude on their attention as it wraps up the story or task they just put away, as a courtesy and a defense, also.  We are all aware that occasionally we wake up immediately alert, but at times need a few minutes to begin the day.  We step into a darkened area, and it takes a minute or three for our brains to catch up and make use of what our eyes are seeing, night vision we call this adaptation.

And I am going to go ahead and say it.  Yes, this lack of allowing a transition is part of the hazard of what short TV programs and most particularly 30 and 60 second commercials do to us and to our children.  If the commercial is interesting, our attention is going to be distracted as the story resumes.  I am not a scientist, but I do see a link between prevalence of commercials and kids with Attention Deficit Disorders.  Possibly the content of TV programs has an impact, but I don’t know of any studies reporting specifically on the impact of commercials on attention disorders.

As for computers and books in bed, make an agreement before hand for a balance of time and efforts to accommodate family and personal needs with individual choices.  But don’t interrupt, and allow for a transition.  For instance, don’t get ready for bed before putting up the computer.  Putting the computer away, in a different room, and changing clothes permits a transition from the task or adventure to going to bed.  Put the book away in a separate room, then brush your teeth.  At a minimum, wait for eye contact to exchange awareness of the other, before speaking.  "If I can’t see your eyes, I can’t hear you," comes from my childhood, and seems to be true even today.

The hard part is knowing the difference between a loved one initiating a conversation either while working or as they put the computer or book away, and nagging at them to converse or take up another activity.  The second is rude, and not productive.  If charity begins at home, so does courtesy.  You won’t get good conversation if you start out irritating your partner to participate.

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