Dino Paranoia

Katiedid Langrock
Fri, 15 Jan 2021 21:00:00 -0800
Lifestyle

"I'm on social media too much," I told my husband. "The news is making me paranoid."

I needed a break for my mental health. I needed a break for a better relationship with my kids. I didn't want them to think of me as someone always with a phone in her hand. They deserve better than that. I deserve better than that.

"So what will you do to help yourself?" my husband asked.
Updated: Sat Jan 16, 2021

"I'm on social media too much," I told my husband. "The news is making me paranoid."

I needed a break for my mental health. I needed a break for a better relationship with my kids. I didn't want them to think of me as someone always with a phone in her hand. They deserve better than that. I deserve better than that.

"So what will you do to help yourself?" my husband asked.

"Color," I said.

My husband checked my temperature. In my three and a half decades on this planet, the only thing I've ever learned how to draw is a dog. And even then, most people think it's a cow.

"Coloring books," I clarified. Unwinding by coloring in the lines rather than scrolling through my feed seemed like the perfect solution. And better yet, it was an activity I could Zen out to with my children.

Over the winter holidays, I received colored pencils and multiple coloring books as gifts. My kids were given crayons and coloring books. The result was instantly satisfying. The anxiety and paranoia from being on my phone all day began swiftly dissipating.

My 8-year-old and I laughed as we colored a two-page scene in a Hidden Pictures book of a clothed dinosaur family in horror while surrounded by dinosaur bones inside a natural history museum. We found every hidden object and colored the whole picture in vibrant colors.

I began getting a little more daring with my coloring book pages — even coloring outside the lines and mixing colors! I know, pretty wild stuff.

Then we discovered the Bob Ross Channel. All happy little trees, all the time. My son took out the sketch pad he'd been given, and together we followed along as Bob painted mountains and lakes and evergreens. We showed our masterpieces to my husband, who was beyond impressed. (His dog drawings aren't even good enough to be mistaken for cows.) Oh, how the serene days slipped by in this fashion, as idyllic as a Bob Ross painting.

Then...

"It's gone," my son said.

"What's gone?" I asked.

"Our picture," my son said. "It was colored, and now it's not."

He held up the Hidden Pictures dinosaur coloring book, but I was watching the storming of the Capitol and barely registered what he was saying.

"I'm sure it's there," I said dismissively. Surely, the book, which boasts over 200 coloring pages, had an accidental duplicate, or my son was simply remembering the wrong picture.

For days, my son said the picture had disappeared, and for days, as the politics unfolding made me look to my phone more and more often, I dismissed it.

"Maybe you changed it with a magic trick," I said today, referring to the magic kit he also got as a gift.

"It's not a magic trick," my son said. "It's gone!"

I finally looked away from my screen to the picture of the dinosaur family looking in horror at the evidence of their demise. The picture had made us laugh as we colored in the page, but now my jaw dropped as I stared at only the black-and-white outlines.

"It's empty!" I said. My son rolled his eyes as if to say, Duh.

I quickly flipped through the book to find the duplicate page, the one we must've drawn earlier. It wasn't there. I checked again. Nada. Then I counted every single page to ensure the page we had colored had not been ripped out. No page was missing. I turned to my husband.

"There's a glitch in the matrix!"

"There's what?" he asked.

"This is like how the Berenstein Bears are now the Berenstain Bears and how Sinbad was supposedly never in a movie called 'Shazaam.'"

"I don't think that's it."

"Are we in a simulation? Or is it aliens? Maybe the Greek gods were real!"

"Go color," my husband said. "It's supposed to calm you."

"How could it calm me when it's the cause of my alarm?!" I yelled, but I grabbed a coloring book from the drawer anyway. I looked at the cover; it looked familiar.

I looked over to the Hidden Pictures dinosaur book on the couch. They had the same title. Oh. I flipped through the coloring book in my hand, and there, on Page 29, was the page my son and I had colored in. Oops. So, maybe no matrix.

"Time to lay off the phone again, huh?" my husband said. "More happy little trees."

Yes, please.