It was one of those $350-an-hour moments. In other words, that’s what someone will be paying a therapist in the future while they revisit it with pain. (Hopefully not.)
Yesterday I was at the bus stop. Waiting alongside me was a mother and her two daughters. The girls sat either side of their mother, who sat wholly absorbed in her Smartphone. I watched as one of the daughters, a preteen, snuggled closer to her mother, and tried to – of all things – talk to her. It seemed she wanted to share something with her, and she searched her mother’s eyes as she talked. It seemed like any shift in her mother’s facial expression would have delighted her. But her mother remained faithful to the screen in front of her. There were some barely audible noises that managed to escape her lips, but beyond that, there was no response. The girl continued to search her mother’s eyes, but at some point I think the reality began to sink in that her mother’s faithfulness to the screen was iron-clad.
There was a part of me that wanted to say something. But of course, I couldn’t. It’s kind of similar to the idea of not intervening as the cheetah is about to catch the deer. These private painful moments are left to be addressed by those who inflict it and those who experience it.
Is the mother’s phone-use the guilty party here, or would this have happened even without the phone? I think it’s the former. Most mothers want to be good mothers, but our world offers a bevy of distractions, making it so easy to forget what is real.
turnoffyourphone 