The Winter of Our Disconnect Read Free

didn’t blink an eye. Looking back, I can understand why. They didn’t hear me.
    Well, they are teenagers. And they were busy. Uploading photos from last night’s gathering, stalking a potential boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s Facebook friends, watching Odie the Talking Pug on YouTube (“I ruuuv ooooo,” he howls to David Letterman). “Guys, are you listening?” I persisted.
    “Can’t you see we’re doing homework, Mum?” my son replied irritably.
    To be fair, it was the kind of thing I say a lot. Such as, “That’s it—you’re grounded for life!” or “Wait till your father gets home, young lady” (and I’ve been divorced for fourteen years). It probably sounded to them like just another in a long line of empty threats. It even sounded that way to me, to be honest. The urge to do a full-scale digital detox had been building for years. But it was more in the nature of a wistful but essentially ridiculous fantasy—like having a torrid affair with the Dalai Lama, or learning to tie a scarf four ways.
    And then I reread Walden . (Note to self: Friends don’t let friends reread Thoreau during an estrogen low.)
    Walden —the story of the most famous stint in rehab in literary history—is my favorite book in the whole world, and I try to read it at least as often as I have a pap smear. I love Walden for lots of reasons, but mostly for its economy—the way it distills life and language to its most intoxicating essentials. You probably already know that it was written by transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, who left his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, in 1844 to conduct “an experiment in living” in the woods near Walden Pond. He lived there for two years in a wooden hut he built with his own hands, subsisting mainly on a monkish diet of wheaten cakes and pond fish. No neighbors. No running water. And, needless to say, no kids.
    To be honest, I’d been thinking about running away to the woods myself a lot toward the end of 2008. It wasn’t just the three teenagers I was wrangling: Anni, who’d just turned eighteen (terrifyingly, the legal drinking age in Western Australia, where we lived); Bill, fifteen, the man of the house (in his own mind, at least); and Sussy, the baby, fourteen (“Juliet’s age when she got married, Mum,” as she constantly reminded me).
    They were at tricky ages, to be sure. But then, at age fifty, so was I. A career journalist, I was now part of the brand-new podcasting platform for ABC Radio. I loved the challenge of spitting out a weekly program, and I especially loved mastering the digital technology that modern broadcasting entails. What I didn’t love was the huge time pressure. I was away from home more than I’d ever been since I’d started having babies, and the sense that I was losing control of my house and its contents—i.e., my kids—was ominous.
    At the same time, our media habits had reached a scary kind of crescendo. It wasn’t just the way the girls were becoming mere accessories of their own social-networking profile, as if real life were simply a dress rehearsal (or, more accurately, a photo op) for the next status update; or the fact that my son’s domestic default mode was set to “illegal download,” and his homework, which he’d insisted he needed a quad-core gaming computer and high-speed broadband to complete, was getting lost in transmission—although that was all part of it.
    Thinking back, I realize there was no one breaking point, no single epiphany or aha! moment, but rather a series of such moments: scenes and stills I can scroll through in no particular order of importance, like a digital slideshow set to shuffle.
    The abiding image of the back of Bill’s head, for example, as he sat, enthroned before his PC in the region formerly known as the family room. Or the soundtrack of the conversations we’d been having for the last year or so, the ones that began with me saying anything at all (“Have you done your homework?” “Are