Confessions of the Worst Mother Ever

“I’m fine with you being a little bored,” I said to my youngest child last night as she contemplated the horror of an entire evening without the use of an electronic device to calm her twitching fingers. “You could play, you could look at some books. Hey, if you want, you could just go straight on up to bed and go to sleep.”

“I’m not a little bored, ” she wailed, her voice hovering over the precipice of defiance, “I’m a lot bored.”

We’ve been battling back the use of “electronics” or “screens”. Somehow, probably in our week off after Easter, we fell into the way of turning on a “family movie” in the evening, which right now is Master Chef Jr. (great great program) and then everybody enhancing that already dubious experience by layering over their own kindle or iPod. “I’m watching,” a child will say, “I’m just also playing a game.” And I appreciate the horror. Just sitting watching tv is a rotten thing to do. So, you pick up some knitting, and encourage the whining child to color a picture, but after the fifty-seventh hour of some genius child concocting pan seared umami with a side of I don’t even know what that is, I don’t feel like knitting or anything, I feel like reading the Internet. Boredom may be too strong a word, but certainly ennui is fitting.

The mind needs a place to settle, and the presence of technological screen dithering means that all of us are settling on irritation, entitlement, and whining–essentially undoing the effects of each morning’s work. The mind enlivens and expands on mathematics, language arts, history, science, geography, and then narrows back into retreat, the bright light of the screen flickering it’s delightfully empty vacuity. You turn it on, hoping it will calm the tired mind, only to find that it inflames and irritates.

So, I say to the children, “Turn it off”. Put it away. Go play outside. Go read a book. Don’t ask me again. If you ask again, your small world will come to a grinding halt. It seems I am the Worst Mother Ever, both for saying no, and for not saying no soon enough. It’s a bad thing when the child looks to be perishing because she “can’t even just check the time” on her kindle. “Do you even know what time is?” I repost.

I wonder often what would happen to western “civilization” if the grid went down and there was no internet. It would be catastrophic, certainly, and poverty and woe would be abundant and far reaching. But mightn’t it also be a tiny relief? Imagine all the quiet. The blandness of time without every outrage inserting itself into your small, all energy consuming frame. Most of us would probably die from boredom. But the ones that survived would be a super race of thinkers, who could see beyond the reaches of each click.

In the meantime, before the apocalypse, I struggle to turn it off, and read a book, and let the mind wander in pathways not delineated by someone else with an all encompassing platform that gathers to itself every element of life.

Have a lovely day.