Living that Baby Life
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Summertime in Baby Land
Enjoy your exotic vacations! I'm wiping butts in baby land.
My friend Chrissy was just visiting us for a few days and we got to talking about social media. She has an interesting strategy which is to limit her number of Facebook friends to 100. Curbing the number of people she follows ensures that she only stays connected to the people who really matter to her. If she adds a new friend, she’s got to get rid of someone else. The posts that she sees in her newsfeed are coming from current friends, not from everyone she’s ever met in her life.
When I was on Facebook, I had the opposite strategy from Chrissy’s. My strategy was to “friend” any human who crossed my path—friends of friends that I met maybe once, strangers that I encountered on my travels, acquaintances from my past who I hadn’t seen or spoken to in decades. I thought of my Facebook account as a sort of rolodex (remember those??) or address book—one place where all of my contacts lived.
This strategy worked well for me, for the most part. I liked having access to a super-wide network of people all over the world. These contacts especially came in handy when I was traveling and looking for places to stay or information about a new place. Sometimes I reconnected with people in ways that would have never been possible without Facebook—friends from my faraway past that had moved to a new continent, deepening friendships with acquaintances that I’d connected with in passing.
For example, there was the time when I was traveling around Australia and my flight from Brisbane to Los Angeles was suddenly delayed by several days. Thankfully, I had met some lovely ladies from Brisbane when I had walked El Camino in Spain and one of them, Angela, was able to host me while I waited for my flight to get figured out. I remember another instance in Australia when I was passing through a town and connected with a woman I’d met in a hostel in Granada. Being from the area, she introduced me to a funky café and we shared life stories over tea before going our separate ways. This sort of thing has happened to me again and again over the years—reconnecting in Montmartre with an Australian friend that I’d made while at an artist residency in Vermont, reuniting with a guy I’d met while traveling in Europe and hosting him on the farm where I was apprenticing in the Berkshires (and then sending him onward to Boston to stay with friends of mine there).
As you may have gathered from these stories, I’m someone who adores keeping in touch. And social media has made it possible for me to do so with a huge swath of humans. These encounters and connections have enriched my life.
That being said, there is a season for everything. These days, I’m in the season of my life where I want to strengthen my roots, rather than send out new shoots. Being on Facebook and having an insider’s look at the lives of thousands of friends, acquaintances and strangers simply feels overwhelming to me right now. My world has been reduced from a weaving web of connections to a small universe that encompasses my family, close friends, a smattering of neighbors, and not many people beyond that.
Before Rio was born this winter, I decided to shut down my social media accounts. I knew that I was headed towards an intense time when I would need to give all my attention to my new baby (and my toddler), and I didn’t want to have access to the Pandora’s box of distractions that is social media. When Chrissy lamented the lack of baby pictures from my defunct social media feed, I had to admit that I truly didn’t miss it at all.
A few months ago, my friend was telling me about the spectacular photos that her friend was posting from a trip abroad and the envy she felt. This week, my sister bemoaned the fact that “half of her Instagram” seemed to be vacationing in Italy, prompting her to blow up a kiddie pool in her backyard and take a silly photo of herself in a bikini drinking an Italian beverage. I remembered this feeling of FOMO and I did not miss it.
These instances remind me of the intensity that comes with constantly being privy to other people’s lives. Perhaps other people can handle it, but I know myself. As someone who loves to travel more than anything, I honestly do not have the emotional fortitude to bear witness to everyone else’s incredible travel content—not right now, when I’m a stay-at-home mom with two kiddos under two. These days, the most exciting thing in my life is the feeling I get after vacuuming the house and getting my baby to sleep for longer than two hours at night.
We moved from San Juan to Durham this past October and it’s been a really great move for our family. But still, I often think about how different that transition would have been if I were still receiving a steady stream of images from other people’s lives, specifically my friends back in Puerto Rico. Part of why I got off social media was to allow me to have the space to make this transition. I think if I were being bombarded of images from life back on the island, I would constantly be wondering why we ever left or wishing we could be in both places at once. Although I wish that were my superpower (being in multiple places at once!), it’s not my reality. We made a choice to make Durham our home and I wanted to do my best to sink my teeth into our new life, without constantly being reminded of what we left behind.
There’s a great big world out there! But for the time being, my world revolves around two little beings, and you know what? That’s pretty great.
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