My kids are still
relatively young, so I know there are a lot of uncharted parenting
waters that await me. However, at this stage of motherhood, there is
one thing I did with my babies that I am still quite proud of:
I took
away their pacifiers when they turned one.
Hard core, right? The
reason for this was that I feared that the older they got, the more difficult it would be to ween them from their binkies, and I didn't want to be
the mom of a kindergartener who was still dependent upon one.
As my girls have
matured, so has technology. Ten to twelve years have passed since my
Battle of the Binkies, and ninety-one percent of Americans now own a
cell phone. Sixty-one percent of those cells are smartphones.
Two and a half
years ago I joined the sixty-one percent, and here's what I've
discovered:
When
I owned a modest flip phone, it took waaay too long to text (Hitting
a button three times for one letter? Puh-lease.) and
I couldn't access the internet. As such, I rarely had my phone with
me. It was fine hanging out in my purse … without me … for hours
on end.
Once
I obtained a smartphone, everything changed (Read more
about that over here.)
I can text a whole paragraph
faster than I could text two words on my old phone. My email and
social media sites are available to me anytime and anyplace, so
naturally I check them constantly.
I
never leave my smartphone alone. Unless it's charging, which, if I
time it right, is at bedtime
so I can still have it near me while it's refueling for the next day.
It's not that I can't sleep without it, it's just that I … sleep better with
it. Yeah, that's it.
Allow
me to elaborate a little on that last point. The ios7 came out last
September, but I haven't installed it yet. Wanna know why? Because my
husband has to back up everything on my phone in order to make room
for the new operating system. This will take hours. Hours AWAY from
ME. The thought of this makes me anxious. Why? What is it about
this hand held device that has such a hold on me? Why must I carry it
from room to room, everywhere I go? It's become an extension of my
arm, as if I have a hand on the end of one wrist, and a phone on the
end of the other. Forget Edward Scissor Hands … I'm
Edward Cellphone Hands! And you
know what? I'm not the only one like this. Case in point: My twenty
year old niece walked right into a hot tub, A HOT TUB FULL OF WATER,
holding her phone. Worse than that? It took several
seconds
and her friends pointing before she even realized her phone was in
her hand UNDER THE WATER. Why? Because it's always with her. Always.
Here's the harsh
reality. These phones have become our security. THEY'RE OUR ADULT
BINKIES!! We whine when they're not working. We get all fidgety and
cranky when we forget them at home. We make sure everyone knows,
through a tweet or Facebook post if and why we don't have them. It
seems that rather than spending any spare moments to practice the
presence of God, or search His Word for peace and direction, we'd
rather check out the latest life hacks.
You know that phrase, “You can't take it with
you?” How about, “There's no cell service in Heaven.” The
face to face contacts and relationships we create on this earth in
the short time we have left, is what will matter for Eternity. Not
how many followers we have on Twitter.
Man. Who would have
guessed that the smartphone technology would actually cause us to
regress back to the Terrible Twos? With the exception of a few
self-controlled adults, it seems we're just a bunch of oversized toddlers,
sucking on our cells.
