There’s something I’ve been wrestling with for the past several months. I want to ask my mom’s advice, but this is something that she never experienced raising us kids. Neither did my mother-in-law. Or any of their friends. Or grandmas. Neither did yours. We’re truly in uncharted territory here with this pervasive, multi-faceted thing: our phone. It’s a relatively small object, but its reach is massive. We’re all trying to figure it out as we go along, in this new age of mothering.
This last year for me has been one of both deep pits and large growth. It has pushed me to examine many parts of my life, and to look critically at myself, my habits, and where I can- and need to- make adjustment or changes. For the last year or so, one of the things I’ve started to be more cognizant of is my phone usage: When do I use it, and what for? How does it make me feel?
As I’ve taken some hard, honest looks at all of this- my screen time, social media, posting/not posting, likes/shares, etc- I’ve come to realize some challenging things. Maybe some will strike a chord with you, and maybe not, and that’s ok. While this is a struggle for almost all of us in some way, the way we struggle looks very different. After months of critical examination, here are my 3 big takeaways:
- Time-Suck: My phone is a huge time-suck. I have 3 littles, and constantly feel like I don’t have time for anything. Not for books I want to read, projects I want to finish (or start!), friends I want to connect with, or workouts that I want to sneak in. I’m always short on time. Yet, how much time do I waste on my phone? Say–extremely conservatively– I spend 10 minutes looking at my phone, 5 times a day. In one week that adds up to nearly *6 HOURS* of time. Per week. And let’s be honest: how many times during nap time or after bedtime have I sat down to scroll through Facebook for a few minutes, and 35 minutes later looked up? Chances are, I could recoup much more than 6 hours of waking time a week if I just stayed off my phone. This was a sobering realization: I, through some bad habits, have created a good chunk of my own frazzled time-crunch.
- Anxiety: They’re just starting to do actual scientific studies on this, but I already know the answer for me: the more social media I take in, the higher my anxiety levels climb. This may not be true for everyone, but it definitely is for me. The more articles I read about parenting strategies and arguments for/against doing things this way or that way, the more I question my own mom-instincts and decisions. I get more afraid about things out in the world that might harm my kids. A super-rare brain-eating amoeba that a boy got from jumping in a lake runs loudly through my head when my own boys jump in the lake, sucking the fun and joy out of the moment. It fills my head with every worst-case scenario and plays it like a highlight reel, tempting me to believe that there is danger everywhere. It makes me worry about things I likely never would have (and never should have) worried about otherwise. It encourages me to override my own instincts as a mom- those innate instincts which I should be trusting. The more social media I take in, the worse I feel about myself, my parenting, my home, and the world at large. Plain and simple.
- Escapism: I use my phone to escape. I use it to escape the kid chaos, boredom, waiting, conversations with actual people, things I should be doing around the house, and more. When I boil it down–and this is hard to say out loud–I use it to escape my life. Once I had that realization, I couldn’t get it out of my head. It made me feel sick. My life is definitely not perfect. There are hard things and issues that I would love to escape from, this much is true. But there will always be hard thing. That is real life. It will never be perfect. As soon as one big issue is resolved, another one pops up in its place. But hard things and all, this is MY life. I only get one run through it. There is no going back or re-living it once it’s gone. Why am I trying so hard to escape it? I have this feeling that 10 years from now, maybe sooner, I’m going to remember this time as some of the golden years. My parents are still healthy and active, my kids have little-kid problems that are often still solved by food, sleep, or hugs. In 10 years, they will have big-kid problems: the kind that can’t be kissed away or fixed with a nap. And here I am, burying my face in my phone to escape it. This is the good stuff–certainly the hard stuff too–but these people are the very best parts of life, and I don’t want to miss it. I don’t want to miss it all because I was watching other people live their lives on social media, or reading an article that convinced me that I’m “doing it all wrong” and scared me into a tiny, protective bubble.
So I’ve consciously started to pull back on my phone usage, specifically social media. Sometimes I get off-track and fall back into it, but little by little I’m letting it go. I’m trying to be more present in my actual life. I don’t want to miss it, even the bad; it’s the tough stuff that makes us grow the most.
My preliminary (anecdotal) findings are interesting: the less I try to escape, the less I feel like I need to escape, on the whole. Does that make sense? The more I let my whole self, including my brain, be immersed in my own real life, the less I feel like I want to leave it. Even when I’m washing pee-soaked sheets or struggling to buckle a kicking, screaming, arching toddler into his car seat.
I hope you know, friend, that I’m not writing this as a guilt-trip to anyone. There’s enough of that out there already. I’m writing this as a fellow struggler, trying to figure it all out. There’s no manual for this. We are the first generation of moms to have this power in our hands. We’re going to make mistakes and do it wrong sometimes. But we also don’t have to let this piece of technology be a curse. We can take good, hard (sometimes agonizing) looks at ourselves and our usage, and make different choices as we see fit. We can take the good (helloooo texting, shared calendar, and recipe apps!) and disengage from the bad/ soul-sucking.
And in the meantime, if I go quiet on social media, it’s probably not because something is wrong. Actually, it likely means something is right: I’m being more present in my own life, listening to my inner voice, making eye contact with my husband and kids, and maybe finally reading those books that I’ve always wanted to read.
