TV fast: the outcome

I totally forgot to tell you guys about this - so sorry. Parenthood distracts you like that sometimes.

So, we went a whole week without TV, no cheating. No movies on the DVD. No reruns during the day. No TV on the Internet. Not even any Baby Einstein for my little munchkin, although we played Baby Bach for him yesterday, and I have never seen a two-month-old so transfixed in all my life. He was completely mesmerized.

(I know, I know. I'm completely setting myself up for a bazillion TV-is-baaaad-for-kids comments. He only watches it for a few minutes a day, I promise. Leave me alone.)

Okay, so back to the original idea: no TV for a week. It was interesting, to say the least.

I did get some good reading done, just like I had wanted. Among some other books, I read The Kite Runner, which was totally awesome and made me bawl lots of therapeutic tears.

I didn't spend too much time online, either, even though I'm mad guilty of that most of the time. I knew that would be just as useless as sitting in front of the TV all day, so I tried to reign myself in a bit.

I did get some nice time in with Aidan, and I even took some pictures of my little Sweet Pea that I'm really proud of. They are, of course, still stuck on the camera. I mean, I didn't get that productive, people.

What I was most looking forward to was the QT I would spend with Jason. All that uninterrupted quality time with no distracting elements.

Uh HUH.

It turned out that we did spend a lot of time together, but it was mostly silent. Is that so sad? We didn't talk a whole lot. In fact, I spent a lot of those meals - that were meant to be intimate reconnections - sulking or eating in stony silence. I didn't overdo it on the Internet overall... but in the evenings when we were at home together, yeah, we were sitting in the same room, TV off but completely absorbed in our own laptops. This was NOT the outcome I had wanted.

Apparently, turning the TV off meant dealing with a lot of crap we'd both either ignored, suppressed, or completely missed altogether. And maybe we weren't so good at that. I wasn't, at least. I'd had a lot of frustration about being a new mom, feeling lonely (gee, wonder why?) and sleep-deprived and left to do a lot of the parenting while Jason got to go to work and live his pre-baby life relatively uninterrupted. I should have talked with him about it, but I hadn't, not before that week. Maybe all those moments with the TV blocked it all out, I don't know. But during the TV fast week, it all came bubbling to the surface.

We really didn't talk about it all, actually, until Friday night when we were supposed to meet our friends for a night at Disney. We were headed down the road, all was good, I was feeling fine, and then... blaggggghhhh. It all came out. I'll spare you most of the gory details, but suffice to say, by the time we were in the parking lot at EPCOT, I was in tears and demanded to be brought home. Spent that night and most of the next day trying to run away from pressures that felt too overwhelming.

We talked that weekend and got everything out in the open, healed some sore spots, reconnected, snuggled a lot. It's all okay now, really. I'm not trying to run away anymore. And the TV fast turned out to be a really powerful lesson for us both, that we need more than just a week to pour the best parts of our days into each other instead of wasting them, so that when those critical moments happen, it isn't akin to a bullet train hitting us both in the heart. That we're not staring at each other, silent, wondering how to communicate when we don't have the constant drone of the TV to distract us. That we love each other, and love each other WELL, instead of loving our technology a little too much.