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Posted by Kate on 12/9/2008, 1:42 pm, in reply to "wild hippie homeschooling mom"
(Please notice...I did not say the "invention of the internet" -- that's Al Gore's domain...)
I've been a writer for years, and when I started college, all of my papers were written on a typewriter, and I was delighted that it would go back and white-out a line at a time if I needed to make a correction. But I was definitely the queen of crumpled-paper-ball-wastebasket basketball. Looking back, I don't know how I did it, how I ever got anything written. I don't know how anyone did it, but I don't know how we lived without cellphones, either. Somehow we survived.
My husband said we needed a computer. I balked and resisted and refused, saying we couldn't possible afford it. And the first time I wrote using a word processor, and realized I could delete, and rearrange, and move entire paragraphs...I was completely hooked. No more typewriter for me.
Then he insisted we get the internet. Again, I resisted for months. Why did we need that, and the additional expense (with a family of five and one income, I kept the pursestrings tight. I pinched pennies until poor Abe screamed for mercy -- but our bills got paid on time). He cajoled and pleaded until I finally relented. His trump card was -- it's the biggest library in the world. You can research for articles, or get any information you need for homeschooling the kids, right at your fingertips, anything you need.
And then he introduced me to chat rooms. Maybe he thought I was lonely and isolated -- he was right. I had become more and more withdrawn. It happens when you are constantly afraid of saying the wrong thing to the wrong people. I had also developed some serious "female troubles" that made it almost impossible to leave the house for one to two weeks each month -- and I was popping narcotic pain killers as well. It's a problem that runs in my family; both of my sisters had to have hysterectomies before they were 35. The doctor was telling me that it was probably going to be my best option as well, but I really didn't want to have surgery.
So I started talking to people again. People outside the little bubble of homeschooling and church that I lived in. People with different ideas. People who lived in different parts of the world. I started having problems with insomnia, and I found out that people from the UK and Australia are online in the middle of the night and know how to play cribbage and backgammon.
I started living again -- on my computer. Not such a good thing.
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