I.
One afternoon early in Quarantine Life, my young child and I changed into bathing suits, then headed out to the backyard to run under the garden hose. The temps were approaching ninety, an early but not uncommon occurrence for Central Texas in mid-March.
My mischief-loving kid was more interested in spraying me than in getting wet himself. I squealed involuntarily as the cold water hit my thighs and torso. Later, after I called a moratorium on water use, the two of us sat out on a towel, toes brushing the backyard grass. We told each other stories to while away the hour before dinner.
The moment should have felt tender and nostalgic. It reminded me of summer vacations growing up in northern New Jersey, when my mom and I would lounge around the house celebrating what she called “do-nothing days” (only now do I realize this was her savvy way of making the summer days special for me while conserving precious adult energy).
But everything was wrong. The sky empty of planes. The neighborhood streets devoid of traffic. Even my laughter sounded discordant, unseemly.
…
I’ve been limiting my media diet these days, but from what I can tell, two threads have emerged in the pandemic-parenting literature: the ‘how the hell are we supposed to do this?’ rant and the blissed-out ‘savor this precious time with your family’ rhetoric. Both have validity, hold some truth, but neither one captures the underlying angst: how this crisis has amplified the cognitive dissonance in which we permanently reside as parents, sheltering our kids’ innocence from the monstrousness of the world.
It’s not that in the past several weeks my 5-year-old and I haven’t had sweet, playful, even joyful moments. But the context matters. Why we are at home, what is happening outside of our four walls matters. Pillow forts and chocolate popsicles aside, there’s no way that this world- and life-altering context isn’t shaping how we’re experiencing this time together.
We are living an imitation of life inside our (not-hermetically-sealed) bubble. My modest 1930s bungalow might as well be a castle on a hill for all of my insulation from what’s really going on.
As the weeks at home have accumulated, I’ve been thinking of this term from robotics, which captures the moment’s becalmed weirdness.* Perhaps you already know about “the uncanny valley” phenomenon? Coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the 1970s, it describes our considerable drop in comfort level when we encounter robot models that too closely resemble the human form. We respond favorably to humanoid models up to a point, beyond which we sense something odd and unsettling in that small, un-closable gap between human-like and actually human.**
Graph depicting the uncanny valley, from Mori’s original 1970 paper in the Japanese journal Energy.
Life at home with my husband and 5-year-old right now has taken on this not-quite-human uncanniness. There’s a creepy illusion of normalcy: we are surrounded by all of our usual household detritus, enacting our typical (annoying) relationship patterns. We make hippie art projects with seeds and conduct baking-soda-and-vinegar experiments we’ve found on Pinterest. Shot through this intensive nuclear-family time, though, is a grown-up fear, anxiety, and grief over an uncertain future. The three of us living in a 1950s domestic sitcom, while outside our white picket fence unspools a B-movie horror-show, with giant menacing insects and little green spacemen.
Don’t get me wrong. This valley is a pretty damn comfortable place to find oneself in the midst of a storm. As two middle-class parents, both still employed and able to work remotely, we are comfortably sheltering in place while others are actually being buffeted about, uprooted, by this crisis.
This knowledge of my comparative privilege, coupled with a lack of time for reflection, made me question whether I should bother writing at all right now. I’ve never been good at the quick take. My brain does not keep up with media cycles; it’s a slower, more analog affair. I’m awed by writers and journalists who have already produced rich, thoughtful writing about a crisis that’s still very much in process.
But that irrepressible urge to communicate—to check in and say, “hello, I am a self”—won out against my inner critic.
And, like a patient comforted by a diagnosis, finally able to attach a label to their malady, I am compelled to share my eureka! moment. Wild-eyed and stiff-limbed from too much time spent voicing DUPLO characters on my son’s bedroom floor, I grab you by the virtual shoulders to offer this piece of wisdom, or probable nonsense:
I’ve found a name for this place of uneasy tension between hyper-normalcy and disaster.
The Uncanny Valley.
II.
In graduate school, my friend Elaine taught Biology 101 to listless non-majors at Michigan State. Elaine was determined to make plants as glamorous and extraordinary to her students as they had long been to her, a Ph.D. candidate in botany. So, when her class arrived at the unit on plants, she’d begin the day’s lecture with an epic plants-versus-humans showdown. Often, a burly male athlete would volunteer to represent our species. He’d get utterly decimated, no match for organisms capable of living on sunlight, carbon dioxide and water—of adapting to tolerate wildfires—of enduring for lifespans in the thousands of years.
Elaine’s plant advocacy came to mind recently as I was reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, a deep dive into an especially overlooked, invisible corner of the plant kingdom. Kimmerer notes that even scientists define mosses in terms of their lack—no roots, no flowers, no fruits, no seeds. No vascular system to transport water inside the plant. Her book offers a counter-narrative, inviting us to marvel at what remarkable feats and stunning variations on a theme can be achieved with the pared-down simplicity of stem and leaf.
During this anxious time, I find myself escaping into a book about mosses(?!). I think, in part, it’s because Kimmerer’s writing has a way of slowing my pulse. Her prose approximates that calm, expansive experience of actually being in the forests she describes.
Trying on Kimmerer’s loving, besotted perspective, I have also begun (a bit ridiculously?) to envy the mosses. With all of my human striving, my seeking after order and control, I am as hapless and ill-suited for this current crisis as that overconfident undergrad. Periodically, I remind myself of the why—why we are sheltering in place, how this isolation is for the greater good. But the gaps between these reminders are long, filled with petty resentments toward my two cohabitants***, disappointment over writing and activism plans that have shifted out of reach.
Here in the Uncanny Valley, though, in this place of eerie, unnatural quiet, it turns out that doing my best, and doing my part, requires cultivating my Inner Moss. A paradoxical strength and vitality through stillness, letting go.
I thought I’d learned these lessons before, in the early years of parenting—lessons of patience, adaptability, and openness to the unpredictable. But here I am still struggling to grasp the basics, a rank beginner.
Three-hundred-fifty million years ago, mosses became the first plants to migrate ashore, risking the known comforts of the water for the harsh, inhospitable rigors of the land. Maybe it’s time to embrace the moss—who knows a thing or two about endurance—as that most unlikely, and most ancient, of teachers:
NOTES
*Of course, we can also look at this moment as one that, They Live-style, reveals the abnormality of the world we inhabited before the pandemic. This weirdness, then, is partly about our own discomfort when we shake up the status quo and confront the injustices underneath the convenient veneer of “normalcy,” as Rebecca Solnit argues in this piece.
**In this paper, Mori only briefly speculates as to why we experience this phenomenon. He wonders if there is something cadaver-like, a living death, in such proximity to the human form.
***I feel especially guilty about these petty gripes when I consider the essential workers who are living apart from their kids indefinitely. Or who are making the difficult choice to return home each night even if that introduces some measure of risk for their families. I’ve been experiencing this time mostly as a validation of how the nuclear family doesn’t work in this extreme form, how we need other adults to raise kids in community. But for other parents, seeing their children each night is what gives them the sense of normalcy that enables them to go out in the world the next day and face this crisis directly. (Check out MomRage, Episode 90, around 37 minutes in, for a couple of powerful testimonials on this subject.)