All work and no play...or not

[sistermagpie]

I was reading a discussion on Scans_Daily today that circled around one of my pet peeves: the importance of a "normal" life. I don't know why this bugs me--I can remember getting into a big fight about it once regarding a kids' book years ago.

Let me define normal in this context. Sometimes fandom etc. uses "normal" to describe people not in fandom, often associating the word with things that are boring and mundane. That's not what I mean here. I don't think there's anything wrong with living a "normal" life that you enjoy. I don't think that Jim and Pam on The Office have betrayed themselves or us by admitting that they are satisfied working at a small paper company while they enjoy each other and their baby probably soon to be babies.

This is not about putting down the "normal" life--it's more about the opposite, the sometimes unthinking judgment that "normal" is healthy and therefore "abnormal" is unhealthy.

I’m talking about situations where, for instance, certain details associated with suburban American childhoods are held to be immensely important for development in ways they probably aren’t. I remember someone once telling me that when Jodie Foster was asked her about not having a childhood, because she was a child actress her entire life, she replied basically: wtf? I did have a childhood. Just because I didn't have the childhood you did doesn't make it not a childhood. I so love her for that because it sounds like she had a really awesome childhood in some ways. It’s also like how on sitcoms whenever characters have babies it suddenly becomes important to their healthy development that they live in the suburbs.

There's plenty of stories of child actors going off the deep end--it can be a terrible life. But it also, it seems to me, can be particularly good life. One where a kid learns how to be a professional and work with adults from an early age, makes contacts and money to go to college. Or has plenty of fun meeting different people, going on location, learning new skills and acting. The idea that the job would *take away* from childhood always seemed very strange to me. There’s plenty of pitfalls and bad things a child could learn (especially if they don’t make it as an adult actor), but professional acting in general doesn’t seem automatically harmful.

The conversation on S_D, which was pretty fascinating to me, centered on the idea of "play." A character was brought to a moon bounce to jump around and learn how to “have fun.” What was (rightfully imo) challenged was the idea that this character didn't know how to have fun because he hadn't experienced this kind of recognizable experience of fun. Things the character was showed being interested in, like complex math, engineering and building cars, and weaponry, didn’t count as fun because they were too practical and helped with his job. Or were, objectively difficult things to do.

There seemed to be this idea that learning and play were two different things, because play was by definition not practical. But the opposite is actually true. All play is about learning and gaining skills. When baby mountain goats leap around with each other or wolves play fight they're learning coordination and skills they're going to need. Humans are pretty unique in that unlike other animals we play for our entire lives. We never stop learning that way. We rehearse social skills, physical skills, and intellectual skills all the time. Puzzle solving and tinkering might look like work to people who don't like them, especially if it's at a very high level and has practical results (like figuring out who's stealing from Wayne Enterprises or creating a Batmobile that can fly) but that's just an extra plus. It's the doing that's fun.

To overly analyze the idea of these two characters on a moon bounce, for instance: Moon bounces are fun because of the sensation of bouncing, and they teach physical sensations and coordination etc. For older people moon bounces are fun in part because the sensation is fun and in part because of the nostalgia. A person who did not moon bounce as a child and regularly experiences weightlessness and bouncing in a far more extreme way (swinging from buildings on a cable) probably wouldn't find moon bounces that fun. As I said in SD, it’s would be like telling Dick Grayson he didn't know how to have fun because he found swing sets boring when he grew up on a trapeze. There’s plenty of games I found absorbing and fun as a toddler I’d find boring today.

Fun and difficult don’t have to be enemies, and work and play can spill into each other. Charles Darwin was mad about collecting beetles as a kid. The Brontes made imaginary worlds. Professional sports players often enjoy playing sports for fun. Being able to relate to people is, imo, important, and shared cultural experiences can help that, but I think that's different from subtly suggesting that having interests that seem difficult or not fun to a hypothetical average person is a problem. Or that fun/not fun and work/play are divided into categories clearly designated by laughing, yelling or the words like "game" or "fun" on one side and focus, absorption, thought and a complex result on the other.

To use Bones as an example, for instance, it’s one thing to school Brennan on times when she thinks only what she thinks and only what she knows is intelligence—that’s true and as an intelligent person she should know that. It’s quite another to tell her that she shouldn’t find anthropology and working with skeletons more fun than sitting on a beach—that’s not true.

This is maybe an idea that’s particularly important to fans of characters like House, the Leverage team, Batman etc. The Batfamily celebrates hyper-competency in the areas in which they specialize. So I think there’s a natural feeling of being threatened when designated “ordinary” characters get added to that mix. Not because the ordinary character is necessarily bad, but when they seem held up as something the super competent characters need to be more like in terms of their ordinariness. Like, would you really be interested in an ep of Star Trek where a non-Starfleet member taught the crew to have fun by toilet papering somebody’s house?

This lj is kind of proof of that of the whole premise, really. I pretty much write informal English papers for fun.

Comments

[r-ganymede.livejournal.com]

I’m talking about situations where, for instance, certain details associated with suburban American childhoods are held to be immensely important for development in ways they probably aren’t. ... It’s also like how on sitcoms whenever characters have babies it suddenly becomes important to their healthy development that they live in the suburbs.

Ugh. Yeah, I have waaaay too much experience with people doing this. I didn't grow up in that situation at all, and neither did most of the people I know, and most of the people I've met who did tend to assume that we've all been pining for that kind of life ever since we were children.

Part of it is that I grew up in the city, but I've found people are more clueless about non-two-parent households. I was effectively raised by just my mom even before she properly became a single mother. Lots of my friends were raised by single mothers. People who grew up in two-parent households tend to assume that we all have some kind of desperate longing to have our fathers in our lives, even those who have never met their fathers at all!

There are a few things to blame here, I think. The first is TV. Not so much the Ward Cleaver stuff, but the way characters who've grown up without a parent are always portrayed as being desperate for a relationship with that parent. If they don't act that way, it's because they're merely repressing the desperate need for said parent, and they will break down eventually. It's way harder than it should be to convince people that something they've seen play out on TV 1000 times isn't actually true. And of course, any TV show that does is now is just following an established trope.

The next problem is that people often have a limited ability to imagine the situation. They'll think they're imagining what it's like to grow up without a father at all, when they're actually imagining what it would be like if they suddenly couldn't see their own father for years. Or in my case, when I say I had next to no interaction with my father before a certain point, they'll imagine a time when their father was too busy to do something with them, as opposed to years of complete non-interaction while living in the same house.

It's really only when I try to take the word 'father' out of the equation that some people start getting it. As in, "Think of a random crazy bum you've seen shouting profanity on the street. Now, imagine people suddenly insisting you're secretly desperate for a relationship with him, whatever you might think your own feelings are..."

The last problem is psychology, and the BS idea of needing/seeking out "father figures". Believe it or not, the "ideal childhood" crap is very, very present in modern psychology, especially in family counseling. I was forced to undergo such counseling at thirteen because I was refusing mandatory visitation with my father.

The psychologist just wouldn't get at first that I didn't have any pressing need for a father figure. He'd ask questions like "What do you imagine when you think about having a better father?" And seemed confused when I was like "Huh? I've never done that."

I was old enough to demand an explanation for exactly why they were forcing me to waste three hours every week with my father, and what I got was basically the exact sort of nonsense you're talking about in the post. It was like, they saw two-parent (father and mother, of course) households as necessary for healthy development, and any deviation from this leads to DRUGS and ALCOHOL and UTTER DISASTER! So they tried to cram everyone back into something based on the father-mother model, even when it made no sense.

To be fair to the psychologist I got, he did realize how stupid the reasoning was once I made him say it out loud explicitly (and told him "You know that *I* have control over whether or not I do stuff like that, right?"). He recommended against more forced interaction. Other children aren't necessarily so lucky, though. The blind "children need a father" nonsense can lead to things like children having forced visitation with a father who's in prison for abusing them (<-this has actually happened).

And I think my comment is about as long as the post. Clearly I have Strong Feelings about this, but I will stop now.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

You totally nailed it! It's funny that this made me remember a talk show I saw years ago that had the unusual premise of the opposite--there were all these people claiming that fathers were worthless because they'd done fine in single parent homes. Which in a way was the same idea--I mean, just because you went fine without a father doesn't mean that the father meant nothing to someone else who might have had an important relationship with theirs.

But that show was unusual. Usually there's this starting point that a two parent home is best and it's based on really faulty premises, especially when you're applying it to a real situation. Being biologically related to a person and even knowing that he's your father doesn't necessarily mean they're giving you something in life you couldn't live without. There is often this whole idea that kids, especially in movies, are operating under some longing for a father figure by instinct. And even in cases where they do benefit from a father figure that doesn't mean they were having a problem because they didn't have a father. They may have just been a kid in a situation where a certain kind of personality helped them.

I do love that your therapist eventually saw reason because I can't imagine how irritating it must be to have someone telling you you must waste 3 hours of your week with someone you just don't care to see. You're not covering up some hidden neurosis by saying that, you just know the relationship and get nothing from it. I mean, sure everyone would benefit from a father with whom they had a positive, loving relationship--but people benefit from any positive, loving relationship. Nobody assumes a kid absolutely must be close to their grandfather or have siblings in order to be "normal" yet plenty of people who do have those things get something out of it. Everyone's different! You are close to the people you wind up being dealt in life who provide that for you.

[sunnyskywalker]

That's actually one of my least favorite TV cliches (and I did grow up in a two-parent suburban household). I never understood why these characters should suddenly start longing for a total stranger! Or, for that matter, why they should forgive every awful thing their parents did just because they shared genes and maybe lived together for a while. Like in Battlestar Galactica: okay, Starbuck, your mother did love you in her twisted way... and still abused you, so why do you need to go back in your imagination and make up? Or in Bones: her dad is a career criminal and charming but chronic liar, his crimes led to him having to abandon her, and everyone keeps saying she should really want to get closer to him because he's her dad? She's doing fine, thanks. For once, I think Glee actually did this sort of thing well: Rachel and her mom have spent years wondering what it would be like to know each other, and when they finally meet, they don't feel any magic spark at all, and can't make it appear.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

One reason a real person might want to find and talk to an absent or distant parent is to tie up loose ends. Sort-of like some segments of fandom wanted Harry to come to some resolution with Snape. Those two characters will never get along unless one or the other goes completely OOC but the need for resolution is there.

Some RL people may feel the need to do that, others might not. Some RL people might buy into the idea that meeting the parent or coming to grips with a distant sort of parent will bring a break-through like a therapy session seems to do in TV shows: everyone gets weepy, the parent apologizes or beats the breast, the kid tearfully forgives, they hug... Hm. Sounds a lot like A Boy Named Sue.

Sometimes, you just want answers. No reconciliation, no snot-filled scenes, no nothing but having your say and getting it out. Finish things, tie up the loose ends.

IMO, of course. Your mileage may vary.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I remember when a friend of mine was sort of hesitating about seeing her mother before she died. She had one friend who said she needed to see her, I think because this was her story and she needed to know the end of it. Which I could understand, but I basically said that she needed to think about whether or not she wanted or needed to do it and if she didn't, there was no reason to feel like she'd be forever unfulfilled because of it. I think in the end she might not have seen her before she died--and I think sometimes people might feel like they need permission for that, almost.

That also reminds me of an article I remember reading about a couple who went through a stillborn birth. The hospital really encouraged the mother to hold the baby and maybe have a picture taken with it. I think they had the best of intentions based on their experience. They said that based on what they'd seen of others a lot of people who didn't do that regretted it later. But still it seemed for this woman to just give her a horrifying moment and a bad memory. She hadn't wanted to see the baby (she knew she was giving birth to a stillborn child beforehand) and when she took it and looked into the baby's face she was just disturbed by it.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

Those stories remind me of different funeral customs in different places where I've lived. When my dad died in California and, again, when my mother died and was buried in Alabama, they didn't lower the coffin into the grave until the mourners had left. At my dad's funeral my mother told me this is because it might give the mourners bad dreams (or, I suppose, the irrational but very real feeling that a loved one has been buried alive but, she didn't say that.) In South Dakota, at least in the little town we lived in, lowering the coffin was an expected part of the graveside service. People threw in handsful of dirt, beginning with the family and working its way down to everyone who was there. The funeral I attended in NC was similar to the SD funeral except the deceased was buried in one of those above-ground vaults. We all stood around talking and watching while they lifted the casket up and sealed it inside.

Thinking about the NC funeral, everyone driving along the route to the cemetery stopped their cars and got out, put hands over hearts or doffed hats even though this was not a military funeral. I remember when we used to do that in CA, back when we were told to whisper when a funeral procession went by. Odd how some things hang on in a place when they vanish in other places.