Adult Fantasy by Briohny Doyle

Author:Briohny Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, SOC026000, SOC010000, POL000000, SOC022000, HUM000000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2017-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

Now that many millennials are leaving their narcissistic years behind and selflessly forming families of their own, profiles of my generation as parents are beginning to show up in the media. In December 2015, Time ran a cover emblazoned with a typically hyperbolic headline — ‘Help! My Parents are Millennials’ — above a picture of a baby in one of those fancy Swedish four-wheel strollers that look like robotic insects and self-destruct in the first year. The baby’s uncannily adult features (compared to millennials, babies are Renaissance-level mature again) are arranged into an expression that says ‘good grief’. From the magazine’s right margin, two anonymous, perhaps even genderless, but certainly parental arms aim smartphones at this little dear in the headlines like hunters at a zoo.

Smartphones, social media, and the internet feature heavily in Time’s characterisation of millennial parenthood, with good reason. Many of today’s parents start documenting their children online from age foetus, with sonograms posted on Instagram and Facebook, followed by birth shots and important milestones, from crawl to kinder — will these parents continue to document into adolescence, or will puberty signify the beginning of the next generation’s digital individuation? Time will tell. Time will no doubt tell us too. Meanwhile, here’s a statement for the times: my Facebook page is covered in babies. There are babies sucking, crawling, cuddling, clapping, and co-opting my social network.

For a while, Facebook was dominated by the ‘motherhood challenge’, in which women posted five photos that made them ‘happy to be mothers’ and then tagged five other great mothers in their network, inviting them to do the same. These photos became indistinguishable from one another in my feed and also, poignantly, from a news item that dominated Australian media outlets the very same morning. My city’s major daily ran with a front page featuring a similar photo collage: images of smiling and gurgling refugee babies, slated for deportation to offshore processing centres. The headline was ‘Babies Bound for Hell’. There was no mention of their mothers.

While I quietly judged the women of the Facebook motherhood challenge, noting their inelegant timing, there were others who took to trolling, and even posting a ‘childfree challenge’, featuring photos of themselves napping with bottles of plonk, stacks of cash, international air-travel tickets, and molecular degustations, all of which were far more gratuitous and distasteful than the onslaught of babies.

The internet impacts everything we do now, and arguably for millennials more than any generation before. It is a place to perform the self, to make connections and seek information. I cannot tell you how many times, while trying to write this book, I have slipped into a digital trance, snapping back into focus just as I hit search on terms as asinine as ‘how to write a book in less than three months’ or ‘should I eat carbohydrates before I write a book’. I can only imagine what you would find yourself searching when you haven’t slept in days and your baby hasn’t stopped screaming for just as long.

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