My daughter is in Bali. She’s in her third year at university and this is her exchange term. She couldn’t get an exchange at any of the universities she applied to. Well, that’s not quite true. She didn’t apply to anywhere where the mean temperature, August to December, doesn’t drop below 25 celcius, and not wanting to swap one cold rainy European city for another, she opted for distance learning in Bali. As I said then, and will say now, if you can’t live in a bikini at twenty-one, when can you? I drove her and her friends to the airport. I have a photo taken the night before they left. Bubbly wine in hands, three heads tipped back in laughter. Off to see the world, all girls together.
Up until now it was going well. We got regular updates and photos of her surfing, attending cooking classes, clubbing, and undergoing what looked suspiciously like a religious ceremony - lots of flower headdresses and silk wraparounds. If she arrives home barefoot, in orange robes and with a shaved head, I guess I’ll start worrying.
There aren’t so many pictures of her at a computer, doing distance learning stuff, but never mind.
I say was going well, because last week I got the call I had been expecting. The one in which I got to be mum again. And it began with bedbugs.
Personally I blame smartphones. They are the beginning, middle and end of the problem.
The beginning, because in less than the time it takes to strip the bed and throw the sheets in the wash, one of the girls was able to contact the cleaner at the Swedish Department for Gen Z Kids, Currently Discovering that Unexpected and Unwelcome Things Will Happen.
Throw everything away immediately! the cleaner advised. (Well he conceded that the clothes could be boil-washed, but the suitcases must be destroyed.) I don’t know if it was the cleaner, who answered the phone. Bali is several different time-zones away. To be fair, I’m sure it wasn’t, but that’s not the point. The point is they didn’t really know who they were talking to, and how much of an authority on bed-bugs he was either. The advice was drastic, it was taken as law, and that was that. I thought the whole point of being young was to question authority?
… and as is the norm nowadays they came, they saw, they panicked and they googled Help! You see it all the time now. With a smartphone in our hands, it’s too easy to rely on someone, or something other than yourself and your wits. Utube videos of people whose boat trip is hijacked by a circling shark And what do they do? They phone the police. As if the police are going to turn up and arrest the shark for swimming too close to a boat.
Back to bedbugs.
My daughter didn’t want to throw her suitcase away. She (and I) had spent way too much time this summer deliberating the pros and cons of this suitcase. We’d been back and forth to Costco, we unzipped it and zipped it, wheeled it in circles, stood and admired it from every angle. And then her grandparents sent her the money to buy it. It’s lovely. So no, she didn’t want to throw it away, not over the tiny empty carcass shell of what might, or might not have been a bedbug. That, and a smear of blood on the sheet. This, I tell you, was the sum total of their evidence! For all they knew maybe two ants got into duel under the sheets. Do ants bleed?
And here again, it’s the phone. Smartphones come with torches, and the ability to magnify. They come with apps, and reverse image search capability, so before you know it that empty carcass has been 3-d digitally imagined and categorized by www.weconfirmyourworstfear as something like this:
(That’s a made up website name - don’t try and find it!)
My daughter suggested Rubbing Alcohol, and steaming the cases. Not good enough. Her companions, who are also her university flatmates (and up until this point potential lifelong friends), were not prepared to carry on sharing a room with her if she didn’t comply.
Yes, you read that right.
I could use this juncture to talk about the lack of nuance these days, the increasing inability of people to accommodate a different point of view. But I can’t be bothered. We’ve all heard too much of that and anyway, by the time these girls hit fifty, they won’t care what anyone thinks about anything.
And then it got really ridiculous. One of the girls began to question my daughter ‘as a person.’ What does that even mean?
Nothing. It means absolutely nothing. It means this particular Gen Z-er has become so fragile and flaky, she’s in danger of dissolving in a puddle of her own self-righteousness.
This was when my daughter phoned me in tears. Ready to spend six hundred pounds on a flight home rather than be banished to a single room with nothing but the odd bedbug for company. I supported her because it would have been very lonely indeed, even with a thousand bedbugs. And because she was right.
Don’t get me wrong. Friends are a precious resource that tends to dwindle as we age. I’ve lost friends in the past over matters so trivial, I can’t remember the reason. I wouldn’t do that now.
I’ve also learned to walk away from friendships. Something I wouldn’t have done then.
And I’ve lost friends because I thought I was right, and I thought they were wrong. And at the time it mattered, and the only difference between myself and my daughter, is time.
Ten years have had to pass before an extremely close friendship of mine has begun to repair itself. Distance and perspective. Enough water to flow, enough skies to clear, for me and my friend to be able to see that it just doesn’t matter. And I’m so grateful and happy to have her back in my life. C, you know who you are.
I calmed my daughter. Another parent got involved and also suggested steaming. And because it was late and let’s face it, bedbugs aren’t so big and scary, they all went to bed and slept on them … it. I meant to write it! 😉
The next day they borrowed a steamer.
They only have a couple of weeks left and are still sharing a room. But it’s possible the damage has been done.
In which case I have two pieces of advice for my daughter.
The first is simply, time. When they have kids of their own and partners and mortgages and jobs going wrong, and dreams still to fill, and the first grey hairs, they’ll be able to share a bottle of wine and laugh long and hard about this.
The second would be - ditch the phone.
Until next time,
Cary
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