Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2004-09-15 - 5:58 a.m.

Showdown at the Compaq Corral

A few stolen moments on my own computer. Bliss! Older Daughter, my nemesis, in bed. Ostensibly sleeping, but not, I bet. Listening to my clicking fingers and counting the hours until my keyboard is hers again...

I get up at five thirty. I get up then, in part, because that's when the coffee's ready (and not before, unless I remember to re-program the coffee maker.) I get up because if I get up alone, I can pour the coffee, and I can sit and read my e-mail and ponder and wander, read the headlines, catch up on journals. I can read at my own half-awake ramble, and answer, or not answer, as I like.

That was before.

Now I get up, and halfway down the hall I can hear it already: click click clickety click, Older Daughter is already chatting with friends in foreign time zones. She's gotten up at 5:15 to beat me to my own machine. Can I read my e-mail, I ask her irritably, having to speak to another human before I really want to. In a minute, okay? she says. And then she wants to know, how long do I plan to be on?

If I were more awake I'd bite her head off, but I don't usually eat before ten or so.

If I get up at five fifteen, she gets up at five. She knows before I do when I'm going to get up. She can discern the shift in my breathing from down the hall. Being a morning person, she can leap up and dash down the hall and log on before I can get out of the bathroom.

When I do get computer time, which is when I get irritated enough with her to tell her it's not her business hw long I plan to use MY machine and she can find something else to do entirely, she does find something else to do: reading a novel, sitting in the chair at the kitchen table directly behind my computer table, periodically sighing, or making inane conversation with me so I can't think at all.

I don't want to use my machine all the time. I just don't want someone else to use it. I want it to sit here, available to me for when I think of something I need to jot down, or some muse I want to spend a minute exploring, or I decide I have an immediate need to look up a recipe for Jasmine Tea Ice Cream or how to make concrete planter boxes. I don't want to look over and see that I have to make an appointment to do these things, such that I must request that an adolescent conversation be cut short, and suffer the slings and arrows of her martyrdom, and anyway in the ten minutes it takes her to say goodbye to her friends and promise them that she will return when Mom gets done with HER stupid computer stuff, I have found something else I need to do like take the garlic bread out of the oven and then I am stuck with the parental ridiculousness of a computer I've demanded she relinquish which is sitting, unused, because I can't get to it.

I have also realized that I've sat in front of this computer when I needed to do something else, such as pee, or pack a lunch for the younger kid, because I know if I get up I will not even clear the chair before a lithe teenage body slides right in under me. "Well, YOU weren't using it!" This chair is never cold, these days.

So. Yeah. It's time to lower the virtual boom, I suppose. Computer time limits for the progeny. A dose or two of, "Because I run the joint, that's why." What's all this weight for, if not to throw around some? I'm the boss of her!

Can you tell I don't look forward to this? I hate operating this way. Since that child passed toddlerhood, I've been able to reason with her, mostly. I'm spoiled that way. She's had her obnoxious phases, but she's always come around. Reasoning hasn't worked, in this case, and I've ended up doing all the accomodating in the name of family peace. I've even been seriously shopping for home networking products and a DSL connection we can share, which is at this point financially ridiculous. Hey! Wait! I'm looking at DSL just so I can get my own computer back, while the tires on the van are bald and the younger kid needs to go into orthodontia?That's not good adult thinking, people. That's not peace-keeping, that's just avoidance of conflict.

This entry has taken me three days to write, in little sessions I've grabbed when I could. And while I was considering this paragraph, the kid came and asked if she could lean over me to check her messages. Good timing, girl. I'll need all the resolve I can muster.

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