(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to give me that sweet sweet dopamine hit by ♥️ing it! )
I’m deep into a rewatch of The Sopranos, which I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys good television and wants to remember what actresses looked like before they all Instagrammed their faces. (Someday I’ll show my granddaughters a picture of Adriana and say, See? Your lips didn’t always have to look like the first signs of anaphylactic shock to meet society’s beauty standards!) Anyhoo, I’m currently white-knuckling it through Tony and Carmela’s separation, and last night, in the throes of an argument over the astronomical costs of heating a pool (I’ve been there, Carm!) Tony grabbed the laundry basket clutched to Carmela’s breast — a metaphor for how she shields herself with domesticity — and pleaded, “Come on, Carm. It wasn’t all bad.” Good art reflects us back to ourselves and in doing so reveals something new. I immediately thought of the intoxicating bully in MY OWN life, the one who manages to dictate the terms of my existence, not through explicit force, but by dangling my dependency on him over me like a thousand pound piano I fear will one day crush me. I’m talking about my iPhone, and Tony was right. Even the most toxic relationships don’t start out bad.
Of course screens are killing us. Of course they’re rotting our brains and breaking our children. But until recently, that seemed like a reasonable price to pay. When my six-year-old was an infant, I’d spend those long lonely nights in my Wayfair recliner glider, clutching my baby with one arm and my phone with the other. I read every Elizabeth Strout book I could find on the Libby app, then everything by Ishiguru. I recorded all the minutes I breastfed in my Notes app as visual proof that my child wasn’t starving. And sure, I would regularly google “Does [INSERT TOTALLY NORMAL THING BABIES DO] mean my baby is dying?” and it would spit back, “No, that’s usually okay except in the rare cases when it is ABSOLUTELY a baby death indicator”, but for the most part, my phone transported me from the smallness of my own world (miniaturized by the double whammy of both Covid and having babies), and helped soothe my hormone-addled brain. And here I am not so many years later, nearing the end of this labor camp stint known as early parenthood, still using my phone to get me somewhere else when I can’t physically leave. But something feels different. Bad different. I noticed it this past week over Thanksgiving and I’ve been brooding ever since.
We spent the holiday with my husband’s mother, two sisters, and their partners at my sister-in-law’s house. Miraculously, my husband’s family seems to be tickled by (rather than tolerant of) the company of children. Even more miraculously, my children and the adults in my husband’s family share many of the same interests, things like Pokémon, my sister-in-law’s dogs, my sister-in-law’s chickens, playing chutes and/or ladder based board games, the original Magic School Bus series. The result of these small miracles was that, for a few days, I was not constantly servicing my children. Suddenly I was faced with a nearly unrecognizable phenomenon from my childless years: down time. Bewildered by the blinding newness of the moment — like a prisoner taking to the yard after months in the SHU — I reached for my phone. I scrolled other people’s Thanksgiving Instagram posts. I texted friends and family, alerting them to my #gratitude. Mostly, though, I scoured the internet for Black Friday deals. I gorged myself on targeted ads and holiday gift guides. Things it never would have occurred to me to want, I was suddenly convinced I needed. This linen dress from a small business in Portland, Oregon! That beachwaver B-series curling iron! Then, as I was about to click “purchase” on a $350 Oura ring (down from $500, in my defense!), it suddenly occurred to me, my life will feel exactly the same with or without this Oura ring. My sister-in-law had taken the kids to the playground. My husband and I were sitting next to each other on her couch in silence, staring at our phones. My body is aging. My children are growing. My time is running out, and here I am, trapped in the addiction cycle of the internet. I felt hollow and nauseous, in that sugar-sick way that comes from eating too much raw cookie dough, or listening to a Taylor Swift album recorded after 2014 more than three times. I was queasy, Reader. I was hurt.
The more I began to pay attention, the worse I felt. See the inbox flooded with hundreds of emails daily, but rarely from a friend or family member. Try to find a personal text message somewhere amid the crush of shakedowns from the DNC and the latest Andie swimwear deals. A few years ago, my phone was a lifeline to people and stories, a portal to the human experience. But slowly, right under my nose, it’s become a firehose in my face, dousing me, DROWNING me, in shit I don’t need.
Recently, I listened to an episode of the Heavyweight podcast (yes, on my phone, not all bad, Carm!) in which the host, Jonathan Goldstein, reflects on his decision to give up alcohol. In it, he describes the comfort of drinking during his son’s infancy:
“At night I drank. It evened me out, and allowed for a feeling of bliss, perhaps the only bliss I’ve ever known. While other forms of joy were complicated by guilt or intrusive thoughts, drinking alone in that kitchen was always simple. There was a liquor store across the street, and seeing it through the window, luminous in the night, stocked with all those bottles representing the nights of drinking that lay ahead made me feel like everything was going to be alright. Night after night in that small Brooklyn kitchen, I drank and watched YouTube videos of old Jerry Lewis appearances on talk shows and kissed the top of our baby’s head. Each night was like biting into the first square of a miles-long Hershey’s chocolate bar. But as blissful as that time was, when I think back on it, I’m unable to recall very much. It’s all a vague Calgon bath. That is the exchange I made.”
For me, becoming a parent has been full of all the transformative, untranslatable moments people who already have kids promise you, knowingly and often with a wink of condescension. It has also been terrifying, lonely, and heartachingly boring. But faced with the new responsibility of a helpless human life, one cannot (or at least really SHOULD not) indulge this angst. (Imagine how difficult for a person whose muse is her own hurt feelings!) To cope, you drink, you eat ice cream, you put your credit card into Apple Pay so you can buy garbage on your phone faster than you can crack a wine bottle. You fold all the laundry with your headphones on and try not to resent the other scared, restless person with whom you’re co-parenting, if you’re lucky enough to have the help. Then one day you look up and it’s not so terrifying, it’s funnier, your children suddenly make you feel safe instead of painfully alone, but your wheels are still gripping the tracks of the habits you developed to survive. It can seem like every time you grow into a new life, it immediately outgrows you. The hours of Magnatiles and Legos and Blaze & The Monster Machines go by so slowly, you wonder how it can be so hard to keep up.
I can get smug watching new parents contend with the challenges of learning their way around an infant. (Give them the fucking formula! Don’t make yourself crazy about the naps! Crying it out will not result in lifelong trauma!) Yet every time I enter a new, daunting phase of parenthood, it seems impossible that any person in human history has walked this path before, in spite of the paved roads, the stoplights, the public transportation, etc. So here I am, overloaded with bad habits I collected because at some point, they helped me get this far, dreaming of a future version of me who laughs at the naive, floundering me I am today. Isn’t she precious? I’ll say.
Thank you for the belly laughs. They made my day.
As Aunt Bea would say, This too shall pass. And you've created two lovely boys in this tortuous process.