In an unboxing video, a product is meticulously liberated from its packaging for the purpose of
entertaining overly-stimulated children so that under-rested mothers can take a five minute
shower in peace.

My kids use hashtags. They speak in emojis, slang, and abbreviations. They yell math questions
at Alexa and have favorite YouTubers. They talk about AI and plug papers into ChatGPT. After
school, they meet in VR chat rooms and amass fictional millions in digital worlds. I am terrified
of this—not because I don’t understand it, but because I understand that each of these things is a
new box they fold themselves into. A new mask they must wear to fit into a optional, contained
world.

My kids will know the precious sensation of being unboxed. Birth, by the way, was the original
unboxing. Once they stop grieving their electronics, they’ll see the value of looking at the
scenery, whipping their hands through the air like birds as we cross the countryside in our old
Jeep.

There is an unboxing of a greater kind I want for them. To be unchained! Unplugged! To be
reminded that domesticity is a choice that can be exchanged for a return to the rawness of the
living world. I know they won’t choose the woods over the iPad, but while I steer the ship, I will
steer us down the central line between civilization’s mask and the world without masks that
exists in the wild.

I text the kids to pack up: we leave for a climbing trip in an hour. I fill the trunk with ropes,
harnesses, and helmets, banishing the iPads, Kindles, and Switches to the charging station.
There, they can sit and rot on their stupid vines.

We set off across the South African landscape west of Johannesburg. I am a 120-pound woman,
momentarily victorious, traveling with four children and not a single screen. The kids are dull-
eyed and bitter. They don’t see the beauty yet. We are unadorned, made primal without the city’s
accessories. We are slipping a nail under the tape, prying apart the flaps. We are beginning the
unboxing.

I will manufacture wild for these children of the city because I know that a person cannot live
only in the urgency of the rush. AI is everywhere and they are afraid of what it will mean for
them, and for their futures. They distrust lectures about the value of education. They distrust
authority; the economy is a fiction propped up only by the people who built it. Any one card and
boom—what’s the point? There are various terms for what’s happening to young people, but my
favorite is optimistic nihilism. The idea that the world is ending, might as well get the nice
coffee. Their brand of absurdism puts postmodernists to shame. Slang has consumed their
communication, a slathering of honesty they have applied to a world they deem full of the
opposite.

What can a mother do with nihilist children? What can a mother do when the nihilists are flashy
and fun and loud?

Here’s what we’ll do. We will leave the road, abandon everything but each other and the sun and
the earth beneath our feet. The day is glorious and fresh, and the children soften, forget their
resentment and begin to talk. They share stories of funny YouTube videos, of celebrity gossip, of
fashion faux pas made by fellow nine year olds. This is the slow, awkward return of speech, after
long bouts of slang-only chatting with hand-gestured emojis. I can’t help but grin, and then
smile, and then I’m laughing as the kids roll their eyes but keep playing verbal games and
sharing hand signals and, as pups do in the wolf den, learning to play.

We reach the crag at dusk and do an easy reconnoiter of the cliffs from the top. The children are
no longer growling at me behind dull eyes and I am no longer the enemy. In the distant valley the
sun licks lollipop red over the limestone walls and the children arrange their fingers to make
picture frames. One of them makes the click of a cell phone and mimes putting the phone back in
the pocket. A few stragglers climb on the cliff face as twilight erases the colors of the crag, and
we watch their bodies turn to shadows.

Before dark we are nestled in sleeping bags beside a crackling fire, slurping soup from metal
cups. I am nature’s doula, delivering the truth of the rugged landscape to the children. They are
squirming, precious new things again. Here, look, is the big dipper. And here!— Hear the call of
the owl. And good god, is that a scorpion? No— no it is a wolf spider the size of a frisbee. Calm
yourselves children. Calm your screaming and listen for the soothing sounds of the grassland.
This is as nature intended. Except for that spider, not that. I’ll find a stick.

At dawn we awake bathed in dew, a baptism for the day to come. Wipe the fruit flies from your
eyes, children and toss your sleeping bags over low bushes for the sun to dry for you. Stomp on
the fire, return the heat to the soil. Everything is right.

We set off, each with our own pack. Within an hour, all five bags are hanging off of my arms
and back and neck, and I recall the way giant squid die delivering oxygen to their eggs. No
mater, we reach the cliffs, then trudge down an uneven path and into the foliage below. There is
rumor of a crag with climbing routes at the easiest levels. We will head west following the cliff
until we reach what the guide book calls “kiddie routes.”

A golden orb the size of a dinner plate blocks the path. I hold the web up with a stick so the
children can slither under. Feel the cool earth on your bellies, children! Feel the wondrous glory
of being a part of this woods! Do not look the spider in its eyes, they take that as a sign of
aggression.

Another few meters, another few spiders, each larger than the previous, each somehow blocking
more of the trail. There are cacti in these trees, their trunks barbed. Stay on the path. Don’t touch
the trees. No matter, kids! I will find a stick. Where is a stick? Why are there no more sticks?

What kind of hellish forest has no sticks?

We slither, sidestep, shimmy and Tetris our way down the trail, knowing that surely the largest
ones are behind us. But, the spiders are so big now that we are huddled in a clump watching
them as they watch us. One of them waves and the youngest waves back. We have been unboxed

in the wrong environment, and we are desperate for the safety, however false, of walls and
windows and bug spray and sticks.

And then a shrill cry slices through bone and into soul. What? What happened? I yell. “It’s a
cave!” The middle child reports. No, don’t go in there, kids. There could be spiders. Never mind,
there are more out here, and they are the size of coffee tables. Okay, go in the cave. Run! GET
TO THE CAVE!

We enter, collapse on cool, dry earth and admire the spider-free walls. We dine on crackers and
sip cool water and feel we are the last men on earth, reverting into the cave for salvation like
some magnanimous reversal of evolution. We are home! We dance in the cave and howl and pull
our hair up in bunches as we are checked for bugs.

And then the howling stops and they scatter to sit on rocks. They get hungry. They pee in
corners. They scratch at the bug bites. I rise, inspect the exit to the cave and wonder if that giant
spider was there when we crawled in. It is the size of a pool donut.

Another scream, higher in pitch, alerts me to something good. A good scream is good, I remind
myself, despite the surge of anxiety chemicals that electrocute my core. There is an exit out the
back, they yell. Light like a god beam illuminates a path that is, miraculously, gloriously,
wonderfully free of spiders. There is a narrow gorge; we can make it back up to the grassland
above, free ourselves of this forest of cacti and spiders and razor-blade ferns and no sticks.
Perhaps the children could make it back along the path, but I will die like the squid mother,
having exhausted myself with the mountain of bags and slithering and screaming. I cannot make
it back that way and they cannot go alone.

I inspect the cave. It is safe here, in this box. It is wild out there, and dangerous. The children are
feral, lying in a pile and gnawing on their own limbs for the salt. We must unbox ourselves.
“Helmets on, harnesses on,” I announce.

The biggest kid is twelve, her elbows are brown, knees bony and angled like those of a giraffe as
she starts up the crag. She claws at the rock, grabs at branches, slides over stumps and lumps of
grass. She is a skilled climber with several years of outdoor climbing experience, but she is also
twelve. She must go first because I must tie in the younger kids at the bottom and verify the
knots. I cannot verify the knots from the summit, so she must go. This, also, is a mother’s worst
math. How much can we trust that we have taught them well, and how much should we worry?
Attached to her harness like a tail hangs the rope. I watch the rope sway left and right as she
climbs. When she is at the top, she ties this off and yells. I cannot see what she has done. I must
trust the rope is safe. I do this because I don’t have another choice and because, strangely, she
has fought the lion and won. She can be trusted with life and death now.

The next kid scampers up using the rope. His face has a cut, it has dried the color of the earth. He
does not know the cut is there, he is becoming a part of the earth and the rock, and has donated
some of himself to the forest and to the crag. At the summit, the eldest yells, and lowers the
rope.

And then the next, this one barely able to pull himself up. This one struggles but does not
complain. And the youngest, who does not know fear or mortality or panic as he climbs with the
confidence of an expert but with the skill of a legless, armless thing, using teeth and chin and
armpit to propel himself upwards.

I am last. I am clipped into a rope a child tied off. The others wait on the cliff’s edge above. I
have made miscalculations and the climb fills me with fear that one of them will fly past me on
the way down before I can summit and protect them from gravity. I have sneakers, which turn
one way when my foot goes the other. I have five bags on my body, pulling my neck a different
direction from my torso. And I find myself distrustful of the rope, and then angry that I am afraid
to put weight on the rope.

I break through the canopy to find four children sitting on the edge of the cliff, dangling their
feet, kicking lightly and smiling. The eldest anchored all of them to the clips, they are safe even
if they fall. They are safe, and she did that. She did it. They look past me, grinning. I turn to see
the sun setting over the valley in colors brighter than any rainbow, more delicious than anything
our eyes have devoured.

When I look back they are in their own minds somewhere, they eyes glazed over by the beauty
of the place, and the marvelousness of what they just accomplished. They were trusted with their
own salvation and survived. They have been unshackled, they are wild things, covered in dirt and
blood and unafraid of the abyss they traversed. They are on the cliff’s edge, and unafraid.
Chemicals surge through my body, rippling my limbs with a choking cry that threatens to shatter
me. I lean against the rope and it holds me.

When the sun’s last rays have wiped the surface of the plateau with a flash of gold, I scamper
past the kids, drop the bags and untie the rope. Away from the cliff, we step out of harnesses and
helmets and I carry everything across the grassland towards the tent. We are silent as night
populates the sky with magic. We snuggle closer to the fire and we inhale woodsmoke and
exhale something we didn’t have inside us before.

Tomorrow we will return to the Johannesburg and pluck our devices of the charger like fruit off
a vine, and we will pull on the masks of civilization. An academic researcher mask for me, little
student masks for them.

But for today we have been unboxed.