In which I accidentally give my Beloved Child an honest-to-goodness panic attack.

One of the great joys of independent employment – compounded by the delights of having a spouse who is similarly independently employed – is the yearly summit on familial budgetary concerns – revenue, spending, debts. We’re like Congress, except that we can’t print our own money if we go bankrupt. All we are is screwed.

(I lied before. It is not joyful at all. It is only stress-inducing and depressing.)

Anyway, when one does not have a regular paycheck, making sure that we have consistency in the bank account is important, because our expenses, alas, are regularized, and the bank doesn’t like it when, say, we inform them that we’d like to pay our mortgage in chunks here and there, rather than on certain days of the month. And what that means is that we need to separate the income that we can count on from the income that we can reasonably assume. In our case, the gap between the counted on and that which can be reasonably assumed is rather large this year. Which means that we are cutting back, living on less, and if the other stuff comes through, then we have more for next year.

Which makes sense, right? And it’s terribly grown-uppy and forward-thinking and frugal and what have you.

It’s just that the cutting back part that’s hard.

Everything’s on the table right now. And that’s good. It’s good to put a lot of thought into how we spend money and how we interface with the economy. It’s good to recognize that the way we spend is a kind of voting – and we want to make sure that the things that we value are held harmless, while the things that simply make us more comfortable or that contribute to our ease or vanity or whatever, are allowed to face the chopping block. It’s good, as a general rule, to be mindful in our spending. Mindfulness, in and of itself, is a value.

Which brings me to the internet.

We spend a lot right now on our internet connection. We have a cable line, which is fast, reliable, allows us to stream video like champions, implements our home phone line (thanks, Ooma!) and keeps us connected to the sticky filaments of the web (for good or for ill). I think, no matter what, we will be downgrading to a DSL line (even though CenturyLink is the worst company in the world, and is filled with evil, and I hate them forever). I wish we could switch to the citywide wi-fi, but we don’t get service here. But my husband and I asked ourselves an important question: what if we got rid of it altogether?

And we thought about this very carefully.

How does our internet use impact our family? Well, certainly I use it for work. And my daughters use it for school. And we use it as a family to stream a movie that we watch together. But there’s a lot of negativity that goes with it. My kids have devices that they use more than I wish they did. My son has found every free game ever made and plays them WAY too much. (Granted, I would consider more than fifteen minutes too much.) And it does separate us from each other. It separates me from my family. (Because God knows I loves me the Twitters. And the Facebooks. More than I should.)

So, maybe.

After all, we reasoned, are not wifi connections available throughout the city? We go to the library practically every day anyway. Couldn’t we just check our email there, and maybe write up the occasional blog post or tweet while we did that? And if it eased the possibility of taking on any debt this year (a state of being that we avoid like the plague) then maybe it is worth it?

Or maybe not.

Anyway, as I brought my daughter home from school, I posed the question to her.

“What it would be like for you if we killed our internet connection?”

She turned pale.

“What?” she asked.

“I mean, hypothetically.”

“You don’t do hypotheticals,” she said.

“That’s not true. I speculate. I’m a speculative fiction author. Like, for my job. Anyway, this is a serious question. If we unhooked ourselves from the web for a little while. Six months. Maybe a year. What would that be like for you?”

She started to pant. “What?”

“The internet. If we got rid of the internet at the house, would that be okay?”

“What?” She started to hyperventilate.

“It’s just – wait. Are you okay?”

She put her head between her knees. “I can’t see. My eyes have stopped seeing.”

“I think you might be over-dramatizing this a bit. It’s not like we-”

“I’m all sweaty. Why is the world spinning? Oh my god mom. OMG.”

She says that. In real life. OMG. It’s a word for her.

“Honey, we’re probably not going to do it. I just wanted to know how it would impact -”

“My homework, gone. History Day, gone. Most of my books. Gone. My friends. deviantArt. My projects. My music. My music! Oh my god, mom. I think I’m gonna throw up.”

And the thing is, she looked terrible. She wasn’t over-dramatizing. She really and truly was having a panic attack.

“I’m just kidding,” I said. “We’re not really going to do it. Geez.” And then we talked about general belt-tightening and what the plan was, and why this was just a precaution and whatever.

But still. That panic. It’s not like she’s never gone internet-dark before. We go camping all the time. And family vacations with no wifi. And I have, from time to time, made the family go internet-free for a week or more (this summer, for example). So her reaction surprised me.

It’s true that she absolutely needs a reliable connection for school. Her teachers operate under the assumption that all of the children have good connections (and that bothers me too, but that’s another post.)

So here’s my question for you people: What would it be like for your families if you killed your intertubes? Would your kids respond like mine? Are we all just addicted?

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Employment, Facebook, Moral panic, Panic attack, Twitter