Parenting

In lockdown, parents are mastering the art of the meme. What could go wrong? | Eleanor Margolis


My dad’s latest contribution to the family WhatsApp group was a meme. One that he’d forwarded, possibly from another dad. It’s an illustration of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, walking side by side, with the caption: “Back the fuck up Piglet.”

It’s not that the global pandemic has caused my 64-year-old father to discover memes; it’s more that he’s now come to truly appreciate them. He tells me he has “20 coming in a day, from various sources”. Like a meme sommelier, he’s become very selective about which ones he forwards to the family thread. And his taste isn’t bad. A little schlocky at times, but surprisingly acceptable for someone of a generation whose online presence is largely defined by jpegs of inspirational quotes and below-the-line bigotry. The overflow he sends to my uncle. I imagine the two of them pinging each other the latest corona content, in a sort of quarantined baby-boomer version of tennis.

“We’ve got time,” he says, when I ask him why his generation is getting so into memes. My dad isn’t retired, and he’s one of the busiest people I know. So I’m not sure how this applies to him. I wonder if you become more present as you get older – and maybe seem to have more time. Is he living out these “strange times” in a zen state, contemplating each new meme like a teaching of the Dalai Lama?

“By the way,” he says, “I’ve joined Houseparty.”

In these times of crisis, I’d rather have this irreverent sort of dad than the “hysterically blaming coronavirus on 5G” kind. Although that picture of a train car marked “Covid-19” did somehow make its way onto the family thread. Tweets about parents spreading fake news about how to cure Covid-19 have become a meme in themselves. Like a virus within a virus are the screenshots of mums telling their adult kids to binge-eat garlic, huff bleach or – according to one viral tweet – “put an onion in the corner of every room in the house”.

“My mum has a PhD on coronavirus from WhatsApp university,” tweeted one user. Variations on this joke have now been posted by hundreds of other Twitter users.

Another character to have emerged is the protective yet slightly deranged mama bear, yell-typing at her cubs to batten down the hatches and listen up because her friend Maureen from Zumba wrote a very compelling Facebook post on the healing power of dishwasher salt. But it’s not just the “gullible mums” disseminating misinformation like sugar-crazed toddlers throwing confetti at a wedding. My partner regularly has to tell off her 75-year-old dad for his factually dubious forwarded emails. (Although his latest offering, with the subject line À méditer, is actually a thoughtful essay on the pandemic, which originally appeared in Le Monde. My French isn’t good enough to understand the full text, but an uninformed glance tells me it’s deeply existential.)

There appear to be three types of pandemic parent: the insouciant, the paranoid and the contemplative. Some straddle all three. The insouciant needs to be begged to stop going to the pub, but also creates the best content: the dads dancing with their teenage daughters on TikTok, the mums of younger kids churning out funny tweets about home-schooling. In one TikTok video, a dad acts as a bouncer and a mum a bartender, having turned their garage into a nightclub for their son’s 21st birthday. These creatively supercharged boomers are – dare I say it – making lockdown slightly less terrible. They’re trying so hard to “make the best of a bad situation” and “live, laugh, love” their way through it that – you have to hand it to them – they’re kind of succeeding. Or at least allowing us to forget about the slow collapse of civilisation in viral, 30-second blasts.

In the past few weeks, we’ve all seen those irritating references to the great works of art and literature supposedly created during quarantine, such as Shakespeare’s King Lear. What if that video of a dad pretending to be Basil Fawlty while serving his kids dinner is quarantine’s King Lear? There’s certainly nothing more reflective of the zeitgeist than stir-crazy parents dispensing with their inhibitions; parents in lockdown are doing the “long suffering but cheerful” thing like never before. This is their time to shine, and we should probably just sit back and enjoy the results.

The contemplative parents don’t require as much attention. They’re too busy zenning out to memes, or reading French essays. And even the paranoid parents deserve a break. After all, they’re just trying to help, even if their idea of “helping” happens to be sourcing all of their information on a gravely urgent situation from satirical news sites and anti-vaxx forums. They (accidentally) shitpost because they care.

And, remember, not all of us have mums to tell us to beat the virus with a hairdryer. Be patient with yours, she means well.





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