My mother's address book is one of the small visual details of my childhood that I can perfectly conjure, although I am sure no photograph of it exists. Fake-leather-bound, filled with her formal, spidery script, it was, to me, barely legible, with addresses crossed out and replaced with new ones as friends' lives shifted. I often was dispatched to grab it for her from a kitchen drawer. I knew when she was looking for someone's phone number, which seems unremarkable, except that my own children do not know when I am searching for a phone number, because all they see is me, on my iPhone, intently focused on something mysterious and decidedly not them.
It is that loss of transparency, more than anything, that makes me nostalgic for the pre-iPhone life. When my mother was curious about the weather, I saw her pick up the front page of the newspaper and scan for the information. The same, of course, could be said of how she apprised herself of the news. I always knew to whom she was talking because, before caller ID, all conversations started with what now seems like elaborate explicitness ("Hi, Toby, this is Flora"). And when my mother spent her obligatory 20 minutes a day on the phone with her own aging mother, it played out, always, in the kitchen, where I was usually half-listening as I did my homework, waiting impatiently for her to finish. All was overt: There was much shared experience and little uncertainty. Now, by contrast, among our closest friends and family members, we operate furtively without even trying to, for no reason other than that we are using a nearly omnipresent, highly convenient tool.
It is challenging enough to manage to be in touch with people, to remember to pick up the thing and drop off the other thing, to show up on time, to show up at all, to squeeze in time to read, to respond to a friend's question.
Parents today are often chastised for being distracted by their devices, for devoting more attention to their phones than to their children. I concede that Twitter provides, at times, a more witty conversation than the one I might have with a 6-year-old; that the feeling of productivity the phone engenders is as addictive as it is false.
But it seems safe to say that our own parents probably gave more attention to their myriad daily tasks than they did to their children, too, and even did so in their children's presence.
I was impatient when my mother's attention was occupied elsewhere. But my 9-year-old children, when they see me on my phone, feel something more intense, something closer to indignation. They are shut out twice over: They see that I am otherwise occupied, but with what, they have no idea.
I have started to narrate my use of the phone when I am around my kids. "I'm emailing your teacher back," I tell them, or, "I'm now sending that text you asked me to send about that sleepover," in the hopes that I can defang the device's bad reputation, its inherent whiff of self-absorption.
My husband thinks no amount of narration will change the way our kids feel about the phone. The problem, he says, is that whenever I grab it, they know that I am also holding a portal, as magical as the one in Narnia's wardrobe and with the same potential to transport me to another world or to infinite worlds. How far am I going, they might reasonably worry, and how soon will I be back? Perhaps they sense how vast the reach of the device is and how little they know of what that vastness contains; at any moment, the size of the gap between them and me is unknowable.
Recently, one of my sons has had trouble falling asleep. I turn on the light in his closet, thoroughly check for burglars and aliens, but he still can't shake the vague sense that there's an intruder in the house, that something menacing from the outside has made its way in, or might, while he lies sleeping. And so I lie in the dark next to him, as patiently as I can, willing myself to breathe deeply so that he will do the same. All the while I am fighting the urge to locate my phone, so that I can do something productive, while my children sleep, wholly guilt free.
It is that loss of transparency, more than anything, that makes me nostalgic for the pre-iPhone life. When my mother was curious about the weather, I saw her pick up the front page of the newspaper and scan for the information. The same, of course, could be said of how she apprised herself of the news. I always knew to whom she was talking because, before caller ID, all conversations started with what now seems like elaborate explicitness ("Hi, Toby, this is Flora"). And when my mother spent her obligatory 20 minutes a day on the phone with her own aging mother, it played out, always, in the kitchen, where I was usually half-listening as I did my homework, waiting impatiently for her to finish. All was overt: There was much shared experience and little uncertainty. Now, by contrast, among our closest friends and family members, we operate furtively without even trying to, for no reason other than that we are using a nearly omnipresent, highly convenient tool.
It is challenging enough to manage to be in touch with people, to remember to pick up the thing and drop off the other thing, to show up on time, to show up at all, to squeeze in time to read, to respond to a friend's question.
Parents today are often chastised for being distracted by their devices, for devoting more attention to their phones than to their children. I concede that Twitter provides, at times, a more witty conversation than the one I might have with a 6-year-old; that the feeling of productivity the phone engenders is as addictive as it is false.
But it seems safe to say that our own parents probably gave more attention to their myriad daily tasks than they did to their children, too, and even did so in their children's presence.
I was impatient when my mother's attention was occupied elsewhere. But my 9-year-old children, when they see me on my phone, feel something more intense, something closer to indignation. They are shut out twice over: They see that I am otherwise occupied, but with what, they have no idea.
I have started to narrate my use of the phone when I am around my kids. "I'm emailing your teacher back," I tell them, or, "I'm now sending that text you asked me to send about that sleepover," in the hopes that I can defang the device's bad reputation, its inherent whiff of self-absorption.
My husband thinks no amount of narration will change the way our kids feel about the phone. The problem, he says, is that whenever I grab it, they know that I am also holding a portal, as magical as the one in Narnia's wardrobe and with the same potential to transport me to another world or to infinite worlds. How far am I going, they might reasonably worry, and how soon will I be back? Perhaps they sense how vast the reach of the device is and how little they know of what that vastness contains; at any moment, the size of the gap between them and me is unknowable.
Recently, one of my sons has had trouble falling asleep. I turn on the light in his closet, thoroughly check for burglars and aliens, but he still can't shake the vague sense that there's an intruder in the house, that something menacing from the outside has made its way in, or might, while he lies sleeping. And so I lie in the dark next to him, as patiently as I can, willing myself to breathe deeply so that he will do the same. All the while I am fighting the urge to locate my phone, so that I can do something productive, while my children sleep, wholly guilt free.
© 2015 The New York Times News Service