Last week my phone died. A freak accident left it with a cracked screen and then another freak accident sent it from the ICU to the morgue. We had a spare phone at home — like our parents used to have spare buttons and candles in a drawer — just in case. I put my SIM in it so I wasn’t cut off the from the rest of the world till the replacement for what my sister refers to as my third limb arrived.
Now, we’ve all read about ‘distracted parenting’: when you’re so busy stalking someone you don’t like on Instagram that you aren’t paying enough attention to the little people who you do (hopefully) like. The ones who are right there in front of you and not trapped behind what the salesman promised was an unbreakable screen. Liar.
So, for the last few days I have been functioning with what can only be called a not-so-smart phone. It allows me to make calls, send text messages and after much negotiation with the phone’s limited memory, WhatsApp. Though once I’d read through the 200 messages I’d missed wishing me Good Morning, complaining about school snack boxes and jokes about Manushi Chillar and demonetisation being a success, I wished I hadn’t.
So, what happens when you no longer have push notifications pushing their way into every moment of your life? When you don’t have bird tweets alerting you to the rest of the world’s 140 (now 280) character long opinions and rants? When your hands don’t have something to cradle, swipe and tap at?
Well, I wish I could say that I became this totally amazing mother. That my kids actually started telling me about their day. That the potted plants on my balcony bloomed to life, because I now had the time to actually try all the tips I’d pinned to my Pinterest board about not killing plants.
Nope! None of those things happened!
What did happen was that my eyes no longer felt dry and tired. That I stopped saying “Give me just one minute while I finish reading this” to my kids, while — irony of ironies — I read a Facebook post about the perils of distracted parenting on my smartphone. I actually read an entire book without stopping every two minutes to Google the author, see if she was on Twitter and check if Netflix had optioned the book yet. I was forced to remember things: passwords, names of lakes and capital cities.
Nothing earth shattering. There were no seismic shifts in my life. But it was nice. My kids were of course amused when I told them that this was actually what mobile phones were like back in the day. That the only game we could play was Snakes II. That the internet was not a constant presence in our life, but something that had to be switched on and that made robot sounds when we booted it up. I wish I could say that my next phone will be a a retro relic from the past. But I know that that won’t be the case. I might not be a hands-free mama, but I do hope I’ll be short a phantom limb.
Menaka Raman
Twitter@menakaraman
The writer’s philosophy is: if there’s no blood, don’t call me