Skype beeped, and my son answered. I looked at him and was not impressed.
“Put a shirt on,” I said. “You look like some creepy guy who lives at his mother’s house and spends all day online.”
“Um, I’m 14, so I have to live at my mother’s house,” he said. “I just woke up.”
“I don’t care. Put a shirt on. Did you go to the library yesterday? Did you start your summer reading assignment? I don’t want you spending all day on the computer.”
This summer, I spent seven weeks in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, China. I was 13 hours away, but as far as my family was concerned, I had never left Chicago. Once a day, and sometimes twice, I could check in via Skype.
I like to think I’m too young to gush over the magic of the Internet, but here I am – gushing. In the olden days, I probably would have sent two or three long and heart-felt missives via post, with pretty stamps, and at least one would have been lost along the way. I would have returned home to resentment, chaos, and a pile of things to be done. With Skype, I could put in some of the quantity time needed to keep the family functioning.
Yes, quantity time, which is the not-fun but necessary part of our lives.
We spend a lot of energy trying to make room for quality time, where we can enjoy our families, our friends, and our hobbies. Most of life is quantity time. All those annoying odds and ends have to get done in order to clear time and energy to have fun.
I lived in the pre-Skype era, and it wasn’t fun. My husband used to take extended trips to Asia for work. Being left behind wasn’t quite like being a single parent, but it sure was annoying. He would be paying huge long-distance rates from Manila to express his undying love only to have me ask about what was happening with his company’s health insurance election because if that wasn’t dealt with, we’d have all sorts of problems. He would send lovely emails detailing his adventures in the field, and I would reply asking about where he had put the keys to his bike lock because I needed to move it. There was little quality time, little quality time, and a lot of stress all around.
Long-term relationships are less about romance and fun than they are about the minutia: getting stuff done, the ongoing favors and decisions and explanations that take up the management of a household and upbringing of a child. Relationships are work, we all know that, and a lot of that work is the work of everyday life.
Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but it won’t do a thing about mowing the lawn.
“You have a letter from a collection agency for Northwestern Memorial Hospital for $847. What’s that all about?”, my husband asked.
“That’s the echocardiogram from December. But I thought I paid it after the appeal to the insurance company went through. Let me check.”
From halfway around the world, I pulled up my bank account, saw that the check had not been written, and asked my husband to send them a check. Relationships are work, and the insurance companies will see to that if the kids won’t.
Summer continued this way, one Skype session at a time, as we sorted through the day’s mail, figured out back-to-school logistics, and made plans for my husband and son’s arrival in China at the end of July. The thirteen-hour time difference was perfect. I would call my son when he got up, and then my husband would call when he got home in the evening.
It wasn’t all work. My son told me about his adventures, and I shared different souvenirs I found.
“Check out this milk package – Shaun the Sheep!” I said, knowing that my husband and son were big Wallace & Gromit fans, too. “They were handing them out at the mall. There was some children’s fashion show or something going on.”
“What other cartoons do Chinese kids watch?” my son asked.
“Spongebob. I mean, Hǎi Mián Bǎo Bǎo. There’s a show about sheep and wolves that’s all over the place. Check out these tissue packets,” and I held up one featuring a sheep with a giant pink bow in her hair.
This isn’t stuff you would waste $1.50 a minute on, but for free? Why not.
Parents talk about spending quality time with their children. In the frazzled life of a two-income family, it’s important to take time to have fun and to give each other undivided attention. One of the reasons that families are so frazzled is that there are so many little details, barely enough time to tend to them, and no one to delegate to. The time management systems that work so well in the workplace fall apart at home. Home training can’t be scheduled or delegated. Everything is important and urgent to a young child. Even if it isn’t urgent and important in the grand scheme of things, it takes time to explain why Mommy is not going to drop everything to find the missing Game Boy. Laundry accumulates every day. Child care frees up a few hours, but it doesn’t eliminate a kid’s need for time with parents; they just hold in their demand until dinner time.
Quantity time is the glue that holds it together by getting the oil changed, replacing lightbulbs, and cleaning out the stuff growing in the back of the refrigerator. It involves taking kids to sport practice, reviewing flashcards, and explaining once again that the reason there are no clean socks is that the dirty socks have been thrown on the floor rather than into the hamper.
I was worried that my family’s arrival, for the last two weeks of my stay, would be bad. I was afraid of stress and resentment that I had been gone for so long, as well as a general sense of being disconnected. But that wasn’t the case. The bills had been paid, the nagging about teenage slovenliness was over, and we could get down to quality time with pandas and bowls of noodles. It was a great time.
It was quality time, made possible because we put in the high-tech quantity time first.
