An Open Letter To My Daughter …
This morning we were hand in hand outside your school. You and I. Mummy and daughter. It was 8.54am and the howling wind had me tightening my scarf as I bent down to do up the top button of your school coat. You smiled and I kissed the top of your head. The sun was only just peeking over the low clouds and swarms of other mothers and their children gathered at the locked school gate. I glanced at my mobile phone and you yanked at my hand, pulling me closer to you.
“You’re the only one on your phone, Mummy,” you whispered. A stab of guilt tore through my chest.
I was.
Why was I on my phone during those crucial six minutes before the school gates opened? What were you expecting me to do in those six minutes of silence and bitter howling wind? Was every other mother laughing and playing with her child; cuddling them, kissing them and squeezing the most out of those last six precious minutes before the gates opened?
No.
I looked at the other mothers and they were all doing one of two things; holding their child’s hand while staring into space or holding their child’s hand while talking to one another. I may have been the only one on my phone – but I wasn’t the only one ignoring her child.
I’m not stupid. I understood that you didn’t have a problem with my phone… you had a problem with the fact that I was directing my attention away from you. That something else that wasn’t you was absorbing me and worrying me and delighting me. No doubt, in the half light of the morning, you watched the myriad expressions flicker over my face highlighted in the ghastly blue glow of my screen. You couldn’t see what I was looking at, you couldn’t understand what was in that box that is permanently in my hand and why it took precedence over you.
I looked down at your open expectant face and I explained…
You see, it’s not my phone that is so important. It’s what I am doing on it that matters. And it’s not that the things I am doing are more important than you, it’s just that in order to be here – right here with you, hand in hand – I sometimes have to look at my phone.
Why? Because I’m a busy, working mum with ambition.
Everything I do on my phone has to be done by me one way or another, but luckily for you – if I do them on my phone – I can still physically be with you. For example, I don’t have the luxury of being the type of woman who never has to check her bank balance… so I can either leave you at home while I go to the bank, drag you to the bank with me or you can sit on my lap for a few seconds while the TV is on and I check my phone.
I am on my phone during the dead minutes. The gaps in my day.
I have been awake and with you since 6am. I don’t check my phone when I am brushing your teeth, helping you into your school uniform, making your breakfast or driving you to school. I’m not checking my phone when you tell me about your day or when we are having our evening family dinner, around the table, TV off. I am checking it when I am on the loo, when you are playing in the park with your friends, when we are waiting for the school gates to open… when you don’t need me.
And in that time, when my attention has been derailed from you for all of six minutes, this is what I may be doing.
Checking my work emails (so I’m not in the office away from you), on Amazon or the supermarket website (so I’m not dragging you around a shop), talking to my family abroad (so I’m not in another country away from you), organising play dates for you, checking the weather, entertaining you with YouTube clips, taking family selfies or checking the Facebook page for your ballet class (so that YOU get to do what YOU want) or I may be replying to my friend and telling her I can’t go out next week because… that’s right… I will be with you.
I use up every nanosecond of my day ticking off my ever expanding To Do list via my Smartphone so that when I do get to play with my precious daughter – it’s quality time and we won’t get interrupted.
I don’t play on Candy Crush instead of play with you, or flick through Tinder instead of flick through a bedtime story book.
In fact my phone helps me be a better mother.
Because there are only so many directions in which one mother can be pulled. As I write this it’s 11.48pm and I really should be in bed. I’ve been up since 6am, I went to bed last night at 1am, this is the first time I have sat down… but I’m not in bed because I’m listening to the silence of an empty house and I’m using my time effectively. I have spent my day being a mother to you, a wife, an employee, a housekeeper, a friend, a sister, a daughter, a daughter-in-law and a customer. I have remembered birthdays and appointments on behalf of every member of my household, I have earned money while hanging out the washing and conducting a conference call at the same time. I have spoken to your grandma while cooking dinner and I have booked our holiday while I’m sitting in the bath. I never do just one thing at once… if I can do two or three… because it’s what it means to be a woman and mother now.
It’s called Having It All.
I get to fulfill every role that life is offering me as a strong, intelligent, ambitious woman – and I am doing it with the help of my phone.
Does that make me not ‘present’ at all times? Yes. But then my grandmother wasn’t ‘present’ with her three kids when she was squeezing the mangle in the back garden. And my mother wasn’t ‘present’ with my sister and me when she wanted ten minutes to read the newspaper on a Sunday morning.
Something you will learn, once you get big like Mummy, is that the world is yours for the taking. That a woman can have it all… but it comes at a price. Because when you have more, you do more, and your 24 hours a day don’t expand proportionally to your ambitions.
So my darling daughter… when you see me on my phone, in those snatched moments when you don’t need me and something or someone else does, I am not ignoring you. I am being in two places at once. I have one hand in yours, always, of which I will never let go – and the other hand is planning our day, our future, our life together.
So we can be together more often, without interruptions.
