Free The Winter of Our Disconnect by Susan Maushart

(mine). He covered it lovingly with a blanket and trudged manfully back inside.
     
     
    From my perspective, the next two weeks passed—or wafted, really—as if in a dream. “That’s because it was so dark you couldn’t see anything, Mum,” Anni reminded me tartly. But even so, Blackout Bootcamp proved to be one of the most serene and transforming periods of my entire adult life. A cynic might say it had something to do with the fact that the lights were off but nobody was home. There was a kernel of truth there, no doubt about it.
    Sussy did indeed move out entirely—taking her suitcase and her MacBook with her. “I really think it’s time I spent more time with Dad,” she explained again earnestly, and not entirely convincingly. I wasn’t happy about it. But she probably did need to spend more time with her father, whom she’d tended to see only sporadically in the last few years. He lived in a country town about an hour’s drive south, but had a pied-à-terre just down the road, where he stayed during the week. And if Sussy really believed that home was where the MySpace was, here was a perfect opportunity to test the hypothesis.
    I tried not to feel “blocked”—to use the language of social media—but I wasn’t always successful. There were many times over the years when I’d felt reduced to a kind of glorified service provider to my children, but this was taking it to a whole new level. I told myself it would be a learning experience for all of us, and kept combing through Walden for consolation. “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone,” I read. Yes, but not your daughter , I couldn’t help thinking.
    Although they were more subtle about it, Anni and Bill also took a fugitive approach during these early weeks of tepid milk, hot sheets, and ice-cold showers. (It had been a shock to discover that our gas-powered hot water system required electricity to ignite. When I figured this out on the second day—there had been enough reserve hot water to see us through the first—even I started to wobble. If the weather hadn’t been so sultry, The Experiment might have dried up there and then.) There were a lot of sleepovers at friends’ houses. Less predictably, there were a fair few incoming sleepovers as well.
    The kids had plenty of friends who’d been back and forth like blowflies to Europe and North America. But nobody, nobody had been on a power trip like this one—not intentionally and in their home. The Harry Potteresque lanterns weren’t the only draw card. So too was the opportunity—if you can believe it—to play board games. I hadn’t anticipated that Blackout Bootcamp would have such strong novelty value among the been-there, done-that crowd.
    The first night without power, Sussy, Maddi, and I kicked it off with a round of ImaginiFF. And they initiated it. (“Imagine if we could turn on the fan,” Sussy quipped.) I tried to remember the last time any of my children had asked me to play a game. Not counting mind games, it had been years. Sure, we’d played poker and Yahtzee when we were on holiday with other families—especially at Rottnest Island where, like Gracetown, the lack of technological amenities was world class. And of course I’d played lots of games with them when they were little. (Like a good feminist, I’d taught them that the player who gets stuck with the Old Maid is the winner.)
    But everybody had grown up to be so damned competitive, I’d purposely steered away from anything that involved winning and losing. They still arm-wrestled most mornings over who was going to ride in the front seat of the car. I certainly wasn’t about to take my life into my hands and play Monopoly with these people. The Experiment would mean we had less choice about whether or not to cooperate—like that Hitchcock film where the people are stuck in the lifeboat and they all have to pull together or die of exposure.
    A few nights in,