This is too big a theme for just one blog. I am sure I will write more on it in the future, but it has been on my mind all week. I have to get it out there. I was going to start out with a quote from a Beatles song, but I thought that is too easy and populist, just tag it on at the end. So the obvious second runner up is to have a picture of Joy Division who wrote the song "Isolation". It has been going through my head also.
I have been coming across the topic a lot in readings of Stay at Home Fathers, and to tell you the truth I couldn't really get my mind around it. Why isolation? Why should you feel isolated bringing up your bubbling, full of life kids and all the life around you? It just didn't cross MY mind. By far that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just doesn't exist for me right now. It does exist in a big way. I looked out my window where I live now and think back to where I used to live and realize back then I HAD been living in isolation TOO. No such sights would have lighted my eyes in my last abode. And I thought, that's it! That is the isolation. Isolation Is location, physical location. Let me demonstrate with some quick drawings.
We used to live on a quiet street remarkably even closer to the middle of our bustling city and remarkably even more quiet than any rural dirt road. It was canyoned in by 5 story apartment buildings. Other car ways connected points A to B in a much better, efficient manner than our street. There was no reason to travel on our concrete. It was one of those types of street where you could lie down in the middle and take a nap and not be bothered. There were no trees on it nor any kids on the street either.
My Daughter did have a good friend who lived a couple houses down, but they would get together by going to the playground and being with a lot of kids.
When I took care of my first daughter from 0 to 2 years old at that location, I would look out the window and see nothing but the cars parked on each side. There was not anything to look at, and it made me sad. It was quite a bit boring too. In fact it was better NOT to look out the window and stay centered on being with my daughter. A good thing.
I don't think we saw anybody the whole day through in winter. When my daughter was learning to walk, I would bundle her up and take her downstairs and walk down the street where there was a little tiny park a the end. The trudge back went very slowly as she couldn't go on two legs well and I would have to carry her. The whole process took an hour. We never saw anybody else. I was always so happy when my wife called around 7pm that she would be home soon, and a new body, another soul to see when she came through the door, not because I was tired from being with my daughter, but because I was eager to see somebody else.
When I visited my childhood neighborhood back in 2005, I walked all around the streets by myself one sunny, summer weekday around lunchtime and I was terribly saddened by the whole experience. Because I was remembering the happy years of my early childhood and it made me sad (and they were very happy pre teen years)? No. But because there was absolutely nobody on the streets in all my walking. Nobody. Really. I walked along one busy street with a continual stream of cars and that was even worse. I couldn't see any people in the cars. They could have been robotic vehicles which were just driving themselves around doing all the errands their masters had commanded them to do with nobody inside them. Besides the fact that there was no damage anywhere, I could have sworn a nuclear bomb had exploded in my neighborhood and all the people lay dead INSIDE and could not come out. Where was all the life of people that had been here when I was a child? Is this the current state of American suburbs? (Yes, it was an American suburb I had grown up in). If I had lived there when I was taking care of my daughter when she was 0 to 2 years old, I would have been VERY depressed. I surely would have experienced the full pressure of ISOLATION. I have to ask my Mother if it had been like this when she had been raising us.
I love our cottage. The summers there are unforgettable and like the weather in July, are a bright sunny spot in my memory and even my whole personality. The lake sparkles and there is continual traffic of boats and boaters on the water and people everywhere having fun and living.
But when the weather turns cold and the leaves start to fall I think the summer life is sucked out. There are fewer people there and it becomes more desolate. I don't think I could bring up kids there. A car driving through the dirt road because he is lost, the post man, the garbage man, the gravel grader are a cause celebre that someone has deemed it necessary to come to this little out in the woods. It`s possible that the deer outnumber the people. In fact the thought of bringing up kids there during the rest of the year after August scares me. I think alone with my child I would have the TV on all day or be calling people continually, just to reassure myself that there was life beyond. Not a type who organizes trips so well or willingly, I would quickly change that habit and organize lots of day trips and activities.
I imagine there are millions, countless places like this in the whole world. In many parts of America where your nearest neighbors are not within seeing or shouting distance. In Russia, the "rurality" (this is not a word, I know, but I like it) of Gogol's "Dead Souls" still exists and I wonder how they manage it. In Scandinavia even below the Arctic circle where seeing a reindeer or caribou is more probable than seeing a person. Throughout the world in communities where the people empty the village, town or suburb during the day to go work someplace else and only come back in the evening even after the dark so they still won`t be seen. The isolation bordering on desolation would certainly dampen my ability to be a stay at home dad and contribute to my possible depression.
Isolation occurs through Location. What are you going to do about that cat? Turn the TV on?
Back in my new apartment, it`s a Sunday afternoon in October. Kind of grey and cold outside. There is no one home today while I have been writing. I look out the window to the cross streets below. Oh there is a homeless man looking through the recycle containers while another person throws the remains of Saturday evening bottles in the glass bin. Crash. There is a slacker teenager with a ponytail and black tights on under shorts jay walking. There are two Japanese tourists wheeling their suitcases up the street looking for their rental apartment. There is a 20 ish couple walking on the street under the trees which still have yellow and even green leaves on them, heading in the direction of the park which overlooks the big monument. Oh, there is a mother with two very small kids both under five and one of them... oh that looks like the mother of a girl who is a good friend of my younger daughter in pre school. Should I call out to her? In the next apartment to mine the young couple`s washing machine is whirring away through the not very thick walls between us and.. yes, it sounds like they are going to have some afternoon sex after their lunch meal. That`s OK, I don't mind. It`s the sound of life being created. It reminds me that where I live I DON'T live in a bubble, I don't live in isolation.
Strawberry Fields where living is easy with eyes closed turns into Penny Lane where the barber shaves another customer. They are on the flipsides. As a stay at home father I would choose Penny Lane to bring my kids up, rather than Strawberry Field, and definitely not Blue Jay Way. Maybe that is why they tore Strawberry Field down in 2005.
Part 2 coming sometime.
Listening material that went in my ears and churned in my brain why concocting this blog:
Joy Division - Isolation
Alek S - It's All Good | made of CONCRETE
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