“Guys, where’s Mummy?” a girl called across the kitchen to her siblings. It was late in the day, and the children were finishing after-school snacks that their mother had prepared before she’d stepped out of the room with a vague “Back in a minute.”
“She’s in the office. On the computer,” said the girl’s brother.
“As usual,” snorted one of her sisters.
The child walked through to a book-filled space where her mother sat gazing into a glowing screen and typing a little.
“Mummy?”
“Hmm?”
“Mummy.”
“Just a sec–”
“Mummy.”
“Sweetheart, hold on–”
“Mummy, I need to talk to you.”
The woman turned and looked at the child. “Hi darling. What did you want to say?”
Even as the girl began to speak — and I blush to confess it, for I bet you can guess the identity of the adult in this scenario — her mother’s gaze had already drifted back to the screen, the beautiful, mesmerizing, dopamine-delivering screen.
What was she looking at? Does it matter? It might have been e-mail, or the Drudge Report, or Zappos. Whatever it was, it had put her in a trance, into a state of absent presence.
“Mummy, are you listening?”
“Of course, I’m just–” The woman put up a hand to block the screen, and turned back to her daughter. “Sorry, darling. Say again?”
Other children had by this point drifted into the room to see what was up. “You do that all the time,” one of them said rudely — and truthfully.
“Surely not.”
You do so, the children said. You’re always on your computer. You’re never listening to us. You tell us not to stare at screens but you do it all the time. …
On and on it went, from the mouths of babes. And though the encounter was spontaneous, it also began to seem alarmingly like a family intervention — the kind that usually ends with the addict being sent somewhere to dry out.
“Is this true?” their mother asked, when the children had finished. They looked at her soberly, and nodded.
“Then it has to change,” she said. “I have to change.”
The truth is that, in her secret heart, the woman had secretly known that the ever-alluring screen was stealing her away from her husband and children.
She’d feel a little tug, that urge to “just check” e-mail or some news site.
“Back in a minute,” she’d murmur, edging away from the rest of the family. With shame, she recalled how she’d sometimes even skulked to her desk via an unrelated room, so as to throw everyone off the scent. She hadn’t fooled anyone.
It was time for drastic action, and a dramatic public vow.
“From now on,” the woman announced, “I will only go on my computer when the rest of the family is at home if I’ve got a deadline or some urgent business.”
“Good,” said the children. The computer might no longer be available but, now, finally, their mother would be.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
