“If you don’t think about yourself then you won’t have any problems.”
― Anne Enright, The Wren, The Wren
My family spent a week in Maine with some of my dear friends and their people. At the apex, there were eight grown-ups and five kids at the motor inn. We absolutely took the place over.
Eliza asked me, “How do you know all these people?”
Shorthand reply: “From the yoga world.”
My kids are trying to figure me out. They are finally realizing I’m a real person.“Did you like the yoga world?” she asks, thoughtfully.
I think about how to answer this extraordinarily difficult question in the simplest terms. “Yes,” I say, “but I got tired of all the phonies.”
“What’s a phony?” she wonders. “Someone who really loves her phone? I wouldn’t like those people either.”
– pauses –
“But I do like you.”
I am grateful for this exception to her preference for people who do not love their phones. I love my phone too much, and we all know it. My phone, at times, is a life raft in a sea of demands. It’s a portal to a removed place of ideas and pictures where I can blithely choose to mute sound any time I want. It’s also a place I, like most grownups these days, inhabit a little too fully and, sometimes, furtively.
Furtively, for instance, when it’s bedtime and my daughter asks me, in her sweet pleading voice, “Mama will you lay with me?” It’s been a long, long day, and all I really want to do is clean up the kitchen so I myself can get in bed with a novel. Lying quietly in bed beside my daughter in these moments is weirdly stressful for me, and I might soothe myself with some furtive digital habitry, my phone turned discreetly away from her face as she clings to me and tries to fall asleep.
(I am admitting this to you in trust. You understand, don’t you? We are not perfect people. Yes, I cherish this time. Yes, I have read all the things about modeling perfect screen-time habits for children. Still, here we are.)
Aware that her eyes could pop open and peer around to see my screen, I usually stick to the benign apps in these moments — my calendar, reminders, weather, email, etc. Lying in her bed, moving blocks around on my calendar to try to brace myself for the next day like it’s a game of Tetris, is one thing. But Eliza is unaware that later, in my own bed, I sometimes soothe myself by reading stories of deranged people doing morally bankrupt things, or by hate-following trad wife ninnies.
Ironically, I am, as far as Eliza is concerned, not that complicated of a person. I’m just a mama, and that’s all I have ever been. Her opinion of my current job — freelance writing — is that it doesn’t exist. When she is in front of a screen, she is relaxing and watching Bluey or Sophia the Great, so if I am in front of my screen, I must be doing something similar. And she’s not always wrong, because often I am indeed self-soothing with hypnotic internet fare.
But usually, if I have my actual laptop open, what I am trying to do is desperately catch up with work, answer long-overdue emails, and check important things off my to-do list — often having to do with school or camp or lessons. It’s a piecemeal effort and I fail all the time. In no area of my life am I earning medals, especially in the summer, when everything just feels extra hard.
Yet, this has also been the summer my daughters learned to love to read. It’s the summer they decided, independently of me, to take part in a Brattleboro library reading challenge. And the summer we launched our kids-only little library, Tater Tales! I personally read some great books this summer. Including Anne Enright’s The Wren the Wren and the great Northwoods by Daniel Mason.
When all else fails, books.
And on that note, another of my favorite quotes from The Wren x2:
“We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.”
― Anne Enright, The Wren, The Wren
