I Used to Judge Parents Who Looked at Their Cell Phones
And then I became one
A few weeks back, this picture crossed my Facebook feed, and I had one of those Aha! moments. You know, the ones the Universe needs to send ExpressPost 100+ times before they sink into a level where they genuinely shift your living.
This one is hard, so no doubt the Universe will need to send it again. And again. And probably a few more times after that.
It is so easy to judge what we don’t understand. What we don’t know, first hand. What we don’t feel in our gut. What we haven’t lived with or inhaled or baked into our daily bread.
I remember so vividly being highly pregnant and walking past a park where a man pushed his daughter in a swing while he scrolled on his phone. I rolled my all-seeing eyes and self-righteously ticked off the Negligent Parent box beside him in my head. This dude, clearly, was a shitty parent.
I would never do that, I thought, as I pre-emptively patted myself on the back and waddled over to the Starbucks for an iced latte. I was going to parent perfectly.
Three years later and I scramble every day to sneak in enough screen time to keep my online career afloat. I tell my toddler, “Just one more minute!” as I repost my Medium article to my Facebook feed and try to…
