Living in a fishbowl...

Earlier this year, my book club read a book called “Orange is the new Black”. It’s popular enough that many of you may have heard of it. It’s also been turned into a Netflix series. 

For those of you that are not aware of this novel, I’ll summarize it for you. 

Piper, A 22 year old WASP, makes some silly choices in her early 20’s and gets involved with a woman who is part of an international drug ring. She participates once and (justifiably terrified) ends the relationship. 10 years later, with a new life and much better judgment, the drug ring is caught and she is implicated. She pleads guilty and spends 15 months in prison. 

During that time, she becomes intimately acquainted with the prison system and the women housed by it. She learns about their lives, not just their mistakes. She suffers under the oppression of being powerless. She makes friends. Good friends. She gets lost in her world, despite knowing that her time was relatively short and that she had a fiancé outside waiting for her.  

She refers to “living in a fishbowl” with no real ability to sense the world outside, despite being aware of its existence. This causes tension with her fiancé, on the outside, who has vowed to wait for her. His expectations are based on his own reality and he struggles to understand her current priorities. 

 I have never been in prison but I did work at an 8 week sleep away summer camp, as a counselor. I know, not the same. Except for the fishbowl effect, that is. Any of you that have spent any significant time away from the outside world, totally immersed in a pseudo world of sorts, will know what I mean. We used to refer to “camp time” when it came to dating. A week felt more like a month, due to constant exposure to each other and total lack of exposure to anyone else. Days, even good ones, felt longer. At the end of a summer, it felt like a year had passed. A great year, but still much longer than the days counted on a calendar. Friendships felt more intense and arguments felt more significant. Everything felt exaggerated. After all, there was NO BREAK from each other. We didn’t really interact with the outside world much, so our senses forgot it was there. 

Sometimes, I remember a funny story from camp and attempt to tell my husband about it. (Like, one time in band camp… ) I provide him with the background information to understand the context. And then he just looks at me like I’m insane, waiting for the punch line. And it’s not that he didn’t understand. It’s that he didn’t understand. It wasn’t humorous to him.

He didn’t understand why we would have sung that song in the first place. He didn’t understand why cheering at meal time would create a spirit of competition. And no. He has never understood why cheering about bagels on Sunday makes any sense at all. (My apologies to anyone who did not attend a Jewish camp, as you will likely not understand that reference either.) And I can’t explain it, because the explanation is simply not logical. It’s visceral. Emotional. And the emotion was so strong that we didn’t even contemplate questioning it at the time we were feeling it. 

Amazing how that works. 

As a primarily stay at home mom of twins, I frequently feel like I live in a fishbowl. Some days the hours fly by and others find me looking at the clock asking myself “How can it ONLY be 1:00?  Do I REALLY have 4 more hours till my husband gets home?  I have found myself embarrassed by my lack of awareness of current events and non reaction to names that everyone seems to recognize. “Small” moments feel prominent. I feel as if that momentous tantrum in public must have lasted hours, when in reality it was less than 2 minutes. Two VERY LONG minutes from my perspective, but statistically insignificant nonetheless. 

Many stay at home moms complain about their “working” partner’s inability to understand why that one annoying behavior is so very important. They are accused of “obsessing” about seemingly small details of the day. To them, it’s not small. It’s huge, because it’s part of a larger problem. And when it’s your whole day, every day, it’s hard to see it as anything but. 

I suppose it’s all relative. I’ll keep that in mind the next time my kids complain about waiting a REALLY LONG TIME.