POCKET BOSSES

I wrote this a while ago, but a recent conversation with friends reminded me of it again.

I was trying to fall asleep last night and, annoyingly, my mind wouldn’t shut up. I should have the discipline to hop up and write down all of the ideas and light-bulb moments that fly around in my brain at inopportune times, but, most of the time, I’m too exhausted. So, I made a few notes, rolled over and slept hard. Luckily, this morning, it all came back to me. I was pondering computers and cellphones and iPads and how they’ve slipped so easily and silently into our lives and taken over. Technology has given new meaning to the phrase tied to your desk, only there isn’t a desk, just a tiny, vibrating rectangle of demands that lives in our pockets and purses before, during, and after business hours. It has been on my mind a lot lately because I have children. We who are currently parenting any child between infancy and the teenage years, are the first generation of parents who are being challenged to navigate this world of burgeoning technological advances. New ones happen before we can even catch up with the old ones and our children roll with the leaps and bounds, daring us to keep up. There is no rulebook, very little research and limited incentive to take it slow. 

I have boomeranged between wanting to monitor every moment, restrict screen time completely or give short windows of access, to throwing up my hands and admitting that the uphill struggle is too exhausting. I try to explain to my children that this is uncharted territory, that as a parent, I need to keep their best interests front and center, but because I don’t know exactly how the world of technology is going to effect their development, I have to go with my gut. That elicits sneers and laughs, because in their world, gut instinct is extinct. If you can’t google it, it must not be true. If you can’t find a study to prove it, it isn’t real, and if you do find a study to prove it, it’s just as easy to find an opposing opinion. This opens up a messy world of concerns. Are we raising a generation that will put more faith in their phones than in their instincts? When their existence is more about persona than person, how does that translate into being?

My instinct right now is to try to teach self-regulation. Logically, that can only happen by modeling self-regulation. That is the hard part. When we, as adults have come to depend so completely on, and live so completely in, the world of our tiny pocket bosses, telling children to put them down now and again, falls on deaf ears. They can’t differentiate the line between using technology as a tool or simply as a vehicle of mindless occupy. It is an age old adage that children live what they see. It doesn’t matter if we are answering emails, reading the news, or checking Instagram, all they see is our eyes focused on a screen for most hours of the day, and they don’t understand why the rules should be different for them.

I’m not so sure that they should be. We don’t know yet how those countless hours effect our mental and physical health, the health of our relationships, or the health of our family units. Clicking fingers are now as common as lit cigarettes were in the fifties. Everyone’s doing it with abandon, at the office, in the restaurant, walking down the street, driving in our cars, lying in bed. Cigarettes turned out to be lethal, and brutally addictive. We are quick to condemn all sorts of addictions. Is technology exempt? It is here to stay, so why not teach ourselves how to use it, while we teach our children? Why not have email business hours, just as we have regular business hours? If, in the past, we wouldn’t consider calling someone at home, after hours, why is it suddenly okay to text and email at all hours? I say, if we’re not willing to pick up the phone and interrupt dinner or bedtime, we shouldn’t be willing to send that email or text. Technology removes us from the situation just enough that it feels okay. If we’re setting boundaries for our youth, why not try setting boundaries for ourselves? Let’s remind ourselves, while we teach our children, that our phones and computers are important tools for communication, development, and yes, even research and creativity, but the real world is what’s happening around us. It happens fast and furious and the years slip through our fingers and time throttles us forward. I, for one, want to cherish every single moment.

HUMANITY AND VULNERABILITY

I was homeschooled, mostly, so that doesn’t rattle me.

Every day of my childhood, we were preparing for “the end”, so that’s nothing new. 

I grew up with very little and know how to survive with a bag of beans and a sack of flour.

I was built for this. So why do I feel so unsettled?

It was always conceptual, something that was coming in the future, something that if we practiced and prepared for, we would survive. When I abandoned my upbringing  and walked away from the prophecies and the doomsday predictions, I also walked away from the idea of the apocalypse. I’ve spent years and countless therapy hours moving away from the panic and fear that ruled my childhood.

But now, that panic and fear is all around me. Uncertainty is sweeping the globe and it is bringing out both the best and the worst in people. And I don’t know what to feel. I’m surprised by how calm I feel, possibly because I was trained for this very scenario. I also feel the panic, that old urge to be prepared for every and any situation, the very thing that I’ve been working so hard to move past, knocking at my door demanding an audience.

I don’t want to open the door.

My kids are oscillating between downplaying the whole situation to anger and frustration to buried fear. There are an unbelievable number of opinions at their fingertips and if it is draining and disturbing for me, I cannot imagine what it’s like for them. As a parent, I have tried to give them stability, predictability, love, empathy, compassion—a childhood that I hope will launch them into a fulfilling and productive adult life. I have tried to manage, perhaps too much, any experience that could leave them scarred and confused and unbalanced. But this, this is way beyond my ability as a parent. This experience will be seared in their formative memories. This experience, this trauma, will help to write their stories. I can’t protect them from it. I can only bolster their resilience.

My therapist often talks about being present in your adult self. I love that image, especially in this situation. It means simply, being grounded, acting from the logical brain and not the flight or fight brain. In the past I have been able to do this ridiculously well, the problem being that switching to logic for me was not actually being grounded, it was survival. So while I went through the motions of a crisis, I was completely consumed by panic and terror underneath the grounded exterior. Which means I wasn’t present and not actually grounded at all. So as I am engulfed, as everyone else is, by this crisis I want to practice being present, so I am actually grounded and solid and not just stepping into a persona that I know so well. 

This has been the challenge for me. Now more than ever I need to step into my adult self and model for my children how to find your way through something that you have no control over. Doing so is a monumental feat as it is so much easier to fall back into the patterns I’ve known for so long, that place I go where I become more of a robot than a person just to get through.

I think that it is likely that there are a lot of other people falling into those same patterns, judging by the insane panic shopping and hoarding. I’m sharing my own journey through this just in case there is someone else out there who is struggling to stay present and steer clear of old patterns. Many of us have experienced traumas that have formed us and the way we approach challenges in our lives. We don’t have to let this be another one. 

I’ve learned through years of being a very fearful person, that often it’s not actually the thing itself that is terrifying, it’s the fear of the thing. Fear is debilitating, it’s irrational, it’s all-consuming. It serves a purpose—hardwired into us to keep us safe, but when it has total control, it can hijack the rational brain and keep us from making solid decisions. We are all vulnerable. The nature of being human is vulnerability. We can harness that feeling that is so unnerving to tap into our humanity. It is the only way we will get through this.

I’m not an expert. I’m not a healthcare provider. But I can offer words of support, compassion and empathy. If you find yourself in need of these, feel free to contact me at: askme@angelakehler.com.