Happy Mother's Day to all of you! As we work each day to do what is best for our children, whom we love more than anything else in the whole wide world, I write today with an embarrassing admission:
My 11-year-old son has a Twitter account about which I knew nothing. I discovered this two days ago when checking his confiscated iPod, which he’d lost due to grounding. There it was, the blue and white app, its wings hidden on the last screen so one would have to scroll all the way to the right - past 20 innocent dirt bike, football and basketball games to find its frozen flight.
Luckily, the account was new, and he only had five followers, one of them his 20-year-old cousin who we’ll call Missy and who I trust with his life. Still, I was alarmed because this showed I didn't’t know what was going on with his screen use at all times like I thought I did; the account – in addition to all of the texts to at least a dozen people that said, “Tell me one thing you did today,” indicated to me a loneliness that cut me to my core, and I immediately knew I was responsible for modeling this behavior.
When he inherited the iPod, broken screen and all, from a neighbor, his father and I decided it was okay. All he’d be doing was listening to music and playing Angry Birds, right?
First, we discovered that the neighbor's kid had tons of inappropriate music downloaded, including the explicit lyrics of Eminem, music, which admittedly, I rock out to on the radio with the F-bombs edited out, but that doesn’t sound so sweet coming from your tween’s iTune stream with the F this and F that, especially when the younger siblings are around. So, his father wiped the iPod clean, and we loaded new music by bands that we approved of, like Foreigner and Journey.
Then one day when I was coming home from work, I heard the familiar ding on my phone letting me know I’d received a text. When I saw it was from my son, my brain rejected reality. “He doesn’t have a phone,” said I to myself, “and he doesn’t have a phone number, so how can he be texting me?” Well, turns out there are plenty of apps out there that allow iPod users to circumvent the mere inconvenience of not having an actual phone or phone number, and the next thing I knew, he was telling us how it worked, and we agreed that as long as it was free, he could keep it. Every now and then, his father picked up the iPod and scrolled through his texts to keep an eye out.
He can’t purchase any games or tunes without my approval since I’m the one with the Apple ID, so I felt confident that I knew what was on the device. Imagine my surprise when on a trip to Kohls, while listenning to his tunes, I heard more Eminem F-bombs. There were only two songs this time, but because it’s hard to get an answer from him when he knows it’s likely he’s going to get in trouble, I haven’t found out how those got back on there.
Free or not, he’s not permitted to load anything to his iPod without our OK. When he breaks that rule, he loses the screen for at least a week. All computer use also has to be in plain view of his parents … in the kitchen, living room, or family room and no place else. But he breaks this rule (and gets away with it) all the time because he usually has the blasted iPod in his pocket. Even though we have WiFi, he’s not permitted to go online without permission either, but one cruise through his Safari search engine shows that he’s constantly window shopping for new clothes and shoes.
At night, the devices all get stored and charged in a central location. That is, they were until his father allowed him to keep his in his bathroom instead, something I didn’t agree with but didn’t fight. Now that we know he’s breaking important rules, when he gets his iPod back, we’ll be back to the central location, and not just at night.
When I first got my iPhone, I wrote about it here and likened it to the cursed ring that causes so much trouble for Frodo and his Hobbit friends. And I have to give credit to “My Precious.” The glowing Apple, which does not shut down at night when charged, even when I’ve slid my finger across the screen to turn it off, has gotten me through many a boring moment, connecting me with friends far and wide during empty stretches of time like those between the darkening months of November and February when I – like many others – suffer from at least a mild form of Seasonal Affective Disorder.
“My Precious” has allowed me to laugh out loud on Facebook, take care of business on an email account which is constantly at my fingertips and text with my BFF’s when our husbands are out and we’re stuck with a houseful of kids all by ourselves miles away from one another’s company and support … when we feel overworked and overwhelmed … the lone adult in a sea of children.
At the same time that my phone use increased, I’ve been able to delete the Dr. Pepper from my daily life and cut down my Mommy Juice consumption (two of my other crutches), and I’m proud of myself for both. I haven’t eaten ice cream out of the carton in God knows how long (this third crutch – reserved only for the most desperate of times – I cleverly hid from my progeny under the cloak of darkness), and as long as I don’t bring Doritos into the house, the tips of my fingers can’t be stained by their Orange 61 “cheese” dye.
But it wasn’t until I saw my son’s pleas for friendship, “Tell me one thing you did today,” replied to with one solitary, “Why?” and found out that he’s ready to Tweet to the world that I realized something:
He has inherited my propensity for loneliness, and because I’ve shown him that the people in cyberspace might reach back and validate his flesh and blood existence, he too has decided to take the dangerous journey to Mordor, lured by a ring that has the potential to twist even the purest of souls.
Okay, maybe that’s a bit melodramatic, but still … we’re laying down some new ground rules in the Smaltz family household, including the talk about using social media safely and responsibly. This will all start with Mom, who will only use her phone at prescribed times and who will not reach for it automatically when feeling some “lack.”
I'm off to a pretty good start. Yesterday, I got through an entire Little League baseball game without touching the thing, but I realize the hardest times are ahead … that I’ll really be tested when the kids are participating in a sport that isn’t my favorite and the sun isn’t shining on us, warming our skin, making us feel connected to all of nature, to the screaming fans around us, and most importantly, to each other.
Like many moms, Kathy drives a mini-van full of booster seats and Disney/Pixar DVD’s. When she’s not chauffeuring her kids, ages 11 and under, to activities, she teaches for Prince William County Public Schools, writes fiction, poetry and this column about the challenges and rewards of being a mom to young children.
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