Can we try a more gracious approach?
I was running through my neighborhood the other morning when I noticed a woman walking toward me, pushing a stroller with a bundled-up little person inside.
She was hunched over, using her forearms to push the stroller so she could free her hands to text on the phone she was holding. As we got closer, another woman jogged past me, then past the woman, and tossed off a comment in her wake: “Put your phone away!”
Oof.
I understand the impulse. I really do. It feels like phones have taken over our lives and turned us into antisocial, mannerless zombies who communicate in emojis and subsist on the fleeting dopamine rush that comes from Instagram likes. (Too much?)
Phones are an easy object to rail against and a tempting habit to publicly shame — especially when we see a child seemingly playing second fiddle to them.
But here’s the thing.
That mom — assuming she was the child’s mom — could have been texting the pediatrician’s office about her child’s nagging ear infection.
She could have been texting the pharmacy to refill her child’s asthma medication.
She could have been texting her partner, “Took the baby for a walk! Good luck at your interview!”
She could have been texting her boss, “Taking a personal day to hang with my daughter.”
She could have been checking her email for lab results. Or evite.com for a birthday party headcount. Or Google Maps for the playground address.
She could have been checking Facebook after spending the previous four straight hours reading storybooks and singing songs and making snacks and changing diapers and giving the now-bundled child every ounce of her undivided attention.
She could also have been the child’s stepmom, aunt, babysitter or any of the other forms that love and caregiving take.
The point is we don’t know what led to that moment, or where the moment was leading.
When my daughter was 3, we were playing in the Crown Fountain at Millennium Park in Chicago when a dear friend called to tell me her dad passed away. I stayed on the phone and cried with her while my daughter happily splashed nearby. Sure enough, a
stranger yelled at me.
“Pay attention to your kid!”
I wanted to yell back, “My friend’s dad just died! Pay attention to your heart!” But phones didn’t have mute buttons back then and it would have been weird.
Besides, that’s not really the point.
My friend could have been calling to tell me who was eliminated from “The Bachelor” the night before, and it actually would have been OK for me to take the call.
At no point did I take my eyes off my daughter, and at no point did I cease to be a whole, full human with friendships and hobbies and aspirations and guilty pleasures and deadlines and appointments and demands on my time — even after I gave birth.
Phones are how we catch parents publicly daring to be more than one thing at a time. Parent and employee. Parent and friend. Parent and spouse. Parent and daughter. Parent and brother. Parent and mentor.
I’m not sure when or why we became convinced that parents, especially moms, deserve our scorn for trying to inhabit multiple roles at once.
I suppose decades of pop culture depicting working mothers as cold and distracted didn’t help.
And I suppose it’s easier to scold a parent on a phone than remake a society that offers them so little support. (Paid family leave, subsidized child care, an affordable path to higher education.)
But what if we chose a different approach?
What if we generally
assumed the best about each other?
What if we acknowledged that parenting is hard and lonely and exhausting? That time is short and fleeting and overcrowded? That jobs are demanding and constant? That parents receive very little guidance and certainly no grace?
What if we remembered that parents have parents who age and siblings who get sick and friends who get divorced and co-workers who get engaged? And that we’re trying to cleave our hearts into tiny little pieces, small enough to cover all those bases, but not so small that they can’t still love or break or heal?
And sometimes a phone is the glue that holds all the pieces together.
It’s a lot.
I think most of us are trying our best. I think our kids see and know and feel that. I think all of us slip up here and there. I think it’s OK for our kids to see and know and feel that, too.
And I like to think that woman pushing the stroller went on to have a perfectly lovely day with her bundled-up little charge. And that right after she texted her bestie, “OMG just got yelled at to put my phone away,” her bestie replied with a laugh emoji and they both felt a little less alone in the world in that moment, which is all any of us really want in the end.