Even since J died, I don’t often feel lonely. But one of the times I feel his loss most keenly is when I’m making difficult parenting choices. And none come more difficult than navigating the world of smart phones. Parenting after loss is lonely.
On Friday evening, me and Dylan had an argument. It was about screen-time. It’s the only thing me and the boys ever truly argue about. He’d come home from school and gone straight upstairs. I had just finished work and had bits of admin and tidying to do. When I finally went upstairs, I casually asked him what he’d been up to. He’d been watching Youtube videos for the entire time, almost two hours.
At my house my sons normally have official screen-time in the evening. It’s for a couple of hours while I walk the dogs and then make dinner. I’m fairly sure they get more than this at their dad’s.
Before they started at secondary school this system worked OK. They used various devices for their screen-time, but didn’t yet have their own phones. Since having smartphones, screen-time has turned into a fluid, watery concept. It trickles through my fingers as I desperately try to grab at it and build walls around it.
Despite the phones having screens, they are somehow automatically exempt from any rules. I’ve switched parental on, set time limits, rules are in place. No phones are allowed upstairs at bedtime. But these frameworks buckle under constant demands to tweak and adjust. Can I just have my phone upstairs to listen to a podcast, it helps me sleep! Could you extend my 30 minute limit on Youtube just for half term (and then conveniently forget to put it back)? Can I have 15 minutes’ more screen-time, it’s to do my DuoLingo, I don’t want to lose my streak! I’m using my phone to draw, that doesn’t really count, does it?
It’s so ever-changing that I forget what rules I’ve already agreed and how we managed it yesterday. What tipped me over the edge on Friday was that, after I talked with Dylan about using his phone for two hours, he agreed to take a break until screen-time later. Ten minutes later I went into his room and he was back on his phone. At bedtime, as a consequence of him ignoring my earlier request to stop using it, I told him he couldn’t have his phone upstairs to listen to a podcast. When I went up fifteen or so minutes later to say goodnight, he was listening to a podcast on his phone.
My sons are generally compliant and respectful. We haven’t (yet) had any full-on teenage storms with slamming doors and “I hate yous.” I get some grumbling and resistance to doing chores, homework and having showers. But on the whole we co-exist calmly and with plenty of good chats and laughter.
The one bone of contention is their phone usage. Their phones have a super-natural ability to turn both boys into sneaky under-cover agents. They have lightning-fast reflexes and snatch their phones up the millisecond my back is turned. I don’t think they even realise they are doing it. Their phones are a potent mix of accessibility and addictiveness.
Like the rest of the world I watched Adolescence – transfixed and horrified in equal measures, barely blinking in case I missed a nuanced look or mumbled word. Aside from it being the most awe-inspiring piece of television, as the mother of teenage boys – to put it bluntly – it scared the shit out of me. After the school episode I messaged C: “That school was fucking terrifying.” He replied: “We have village mice.”
In Adolescence the parents thought they were OK because he was in his room on his computer. For me it’s their phones that scare me – these portable, pocket-sized gateways into everything and anything. The boys may be village mice but it’s the same internet they have access to, there isn’t a cutesy village version with bunting and strawberry jam.
This hasn’t got anything to do with bereavement, except it has. Because now everything in my life is connected, however tenuously, to loss. I can’t get away from it. I’ve been working so hard on mine and the kids’ happiness. But when I had that argument with Dylan, all I could think of was: Why isn’t J here to help me? It’s all so utterly confusing and I don’t know if I’m doing any of the right things.
The boys push against my attempts to wrangle this beast and I can never decide if I should back down. I flip-flop wildly between wanting to throw their phones out and get them Nokia bricks, or giving up any attempt of control and trying to embrace this as part of their generational experience. Aren’t we programmed to be scared of the next generation’s day-to-day life?
I feel more lonely in this that I have done with anything else. More lonely than when I’m sitting on the sofa in the evening watching TV. Than when I fending for myself when struck down with flu, or in the flat aftermath of yet another disappointing date. I love the kids’ dad dearly, and I know that in principle he agrees with me about having some ground rules. But ultimately he favours an easy life. He is unlikely to stand firm on this, so I am permanently cast as ‘bad cop.’
I miss having someone here in the moment to talk it through with, to sanity-check that I’m not over-reacting. To back me up when the boys continue to test how firm these boundaries really are. But once I’m done feeling sorry for myself (a state of mind I doggedly avoid), I wonder how J would have really coped with it if he was still here with me. The boys were 9 and 11 when he died, we hadn’t yet entered these murky waters. J hated smartphones, hated the way all kids are drawn, lemming-like, towards anything with a screen. He hated social media, hated WhatsApp… Would he have been a sounding board, a partner and a support to me in this? Or would I have had to factor his own fears and mounting paranoia into an already complex equation?
Leave a Reply