It’s hard to know, exactly, what this says about motherhood and about 2018— but this morning, I spent more than 10 minutes searching Google in an attempt to identify the name of a rather obscure My Little Pony.
I found it.
And finding it felt like victory.
In moments like these, I find myself thinking of the “Little House on the Prairie” books that I loved as a child. “Love” might not be a strong enough word. I read them and read them and read them again.
The Ingalls family didn’t grab the bottle of Log Cabin syrup and pour it on their frozen waffles. That log cabin wasn’t a logo. It was their home.
And those waffles weren’t frozen. They weren’t even waffles. They were flapjacks. Even the words were stronger. And in order to enjoy those flapjacks? They harvested the wheat. They made their own syrup. Their own syrup. Don’t even get me started with the churning and the butter. That bacon on the side, the item I shouldn’t eat because there is no room in my sedentary lifestyle to accommodate the calories? The Ingalls family butchered that hog in order to eat that bacon, thank you very much. They skimmed cracklings off of the fat. They knew what cracklings were.
And when the hog butchering was done? Laura and Mary played a lively game of catch with the pig bladder. The scene makes me imagine a side-by-side comparison of an eight-year old’s Christmas lists.
What I Want for Christmas: 1868 vs. 2018
1868
A new doll made out of an old corn cob
A shinier lunch pail
Vaccines
An inflated pig bladder
2018
A smart phone
An American Girl Doll, complete with her own Mars Habitat, Gourmet Kitchen, Groovy Bathroom, and Gymnastics Set
A Nintendo Switch
To be clear, I have no desire to go back to 1868, for a whole lot of reasons. I’m kind of partial to air conditioning and the right to vote, just to name a few. I am not suffering from the delusion that 1868 was better. Far from it. (Oh, really, so far from it). I just can’t help but wonder, sometimes, though, about what is happening to my sense of the word “effort” in these modern, high tech times. I don’t want to churn butter—though I do like the verb “churn” a lot. But I don’t want to confuse, you know, reaching for the tub of butter that I bought as being “hard work.”
In Ray Bradbury’s dystopian vision of a gadget-laden future in Fahrenheit 451, there is a scene where one of the characters, Mildred, is making herself breakfast. Except she isn’t making it, exactly. Bradbury writes, “Toast popped out of the silver toaster, was seized by a spidery metal hand that drenched it with butter.”
I don’t want to get to a point where I think I have to rely on some robot-hand to butter my toast.
Meanwhile, the Little Pony whose name I triumphantly found, after my exhaustive 10-minute phone search?
Mosely Orange. Also known, to his family, as “Uncle Orange.” He is from Manhattan. He is a sophisticated pony. I know this because the internet told me so.
Here’s the really crazy part. If I owned one of those hockey-puck-internet-robot things, I could have, perhaps, even spared myself the labor-intensive 10-minute Google search. I could have just asked the device—spoken these words aloud to the ether: “Which My Little Pony is yellow with green hair and an orange cutie mark?” and a human-sounding voice probably could have given me the answer. And I would have been all the better for sparing myself that 10-minute search, I’m sure.
Those 10-minutes would be the greatest gift of all, right? The gift of time? There’s no telling what I could do with those 10 minutes. Climb a mountain, perhaps. Or at least find out what in the hell a crackling is.