When my children were very young, we lived in Manhattan in an apartment that was laid out like a long rectangle. I could peek my head out of the kitchen and see into the living room and even a tiny bit into the bedroom shared by my two sons. It wasn’t a great space for entertaining, but as the working mother of little boys, I thought it was great. I didn’t have to worry about the boys falling down a flight of stairs or wonder what that loud thump was in a faraway room.
I got used to working in short bursts: focus for a bit and then glance up to see that no one had ingested a Lego or tried to go swimming in the toilet. When the sounds of the boys playing together turned into shouting, I could intervene before one boy clocked the other over the head. I didn’t always have to stop what I was doing with every incident, but everything took just a little bit longer than it should have. Toddlers are fast – their bodies move much faster than their little brains – and they’re absolutely not governed by any recognisable logic. To them, putting toy cars in the clothes dryer seems like a perfectly reasonable enterprise.
There was a rhythm to those days that I’ve been reminded of recently from a very unlikely source: the American president, Donald Trump. This past week, I’ve been hard-pressed to get any work done because I am so distracted by the short outbursts coming from the White House via Twitter and by the stunning flurry of executive orders swooping off his desk like so many bad-tempered birds.
So there I was at my desk earlier this week and my phone chirped, alerting me to a news flash: there was the president insisting that his inauguration crowds were the largest anyone had ever seen. I turned off the alerts on my phone, went back to work and then had to look up something online. Across the top of the screen scrolled headlines telling me that an executive order had just encouraged the building of the Keystone and Dakota access pipelines, and, in a subheading, that the president still insisted that his crowds were bigger than any other in modern memory. I turned off the alerts on my computer, wanting to shut out any other possible sources of intrusion from the Oval Office, and tried to get back to work.
But then the silence got to me, you see, in the same way that if you’re a parent and you haven’t heard any noises from your children in a while, you start to get anxious. What if that silence means that in fact they’re busy shredding your photo album, or drawing on the walls, or pulling the entire toilet paper roll into the toilet?
I told myself that, unlike being the parent of a toddler, there isn’t any possible thing I can do to intervene with American presidential policy, so I might as well stop paying attention.
If the president does the national security equivalent of drawing on the walls in permanent marker, I can’t very well “put him in timeout”, as I used to do with my children.
I’ve started turning off my phone and working outside, writing in longhand on a pad of paper, to avoid all possible distractions. In the long run, learning to shut out the world while I’m working is a good exercise, but inevitably in this day and age, a person has to turn on the computer or make a phone call – and there it is, the news: he’s authorised the wall between the United States and Mexico, banned immigration from seven Muslim countries and fired the acting attorney general who challenged the legality of his actions.
That Manhattan apartment has long since been rented to another family and my children are old enough to no longer need supervision. But it’s looking like if I want to get any work done, I’m going to have to find a cave in the middle of the desert.
Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi
