Sophie Brickman - Baby, Unplugged: One Mothers Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age

For Ella and Charlotte

The room is still dark when I hear Ellas feet padding into our room, so I know well before she announces it herself that the clock has failed. Again. Mama, the clock isnt green, but Im not tired anymore! she crows.

Great.

After a beat, she climbs up on the bed, opens my eyelid with a chubby finger, peers down, and asks something shes clearly been mulling for the previous eleven hours: When I get older and marry Daddy, will we be twins? Dave groans, rolls over, and puts a pillow over his head. Hes technically within his rightshe did do the 3:00 a.m. bottle with the babybut tackling Ellas Zen Kanesque queries takes the focus afforded by, at minimum, a full ten hours of uninterrupted sleep. On six hours of interrupted shut-eye, its near impossible.

That damn clock. Its worked with every other child I know. The premise is simple: it turns green when youre allowed to get out of bed. Jonah, Max, Noraall friends kids, all different temperaments, all subservient disciples of the clock. Ella? Not so much. Early one morning when I was uncomfortably pregnant with her little sister (now snuffling in the bassinet beside our bed), I couldnt sleep and watched Ellas whole wake-up routine on my phone, which streamed live footage from the high-tech monitor in her room. She sat up, looked at the clock for a few seconds, went over to bang its buttons, then, when it didnt turn green, hurled off her diaper and marched out of the frame and into my room.

I check my phone. Another fifty minutes until the sun rises. So I take a deep breath and tell her what Ive told her the previous three days: well wait for the clock to turn green together. I know this is idiotic. But Im so tired, and my defenses so low, I can see only two other options that will keep my three-year-old quiet: (1) starting the day before its light outside, which is soul crushing, or (2) sticking her in front of the television or smartphone, which Ive vowed never to do, because every article on my social media feed has told me that screen time will make her unhappy, dumb, emotionally distant, predisposed to heart conditions, and as socially adjusted as Robert Durst.

So back into her room we go, and I lie on the floor in the fetal position, demonstrating how to pray at the altar of the OK to Wake! clock. She putters around making castles out of Magna-Tiles and keeping a close eye on me. Ive tried the I just need to get a glass of water escape before, so shes on high alert. Anytime I so much as shift positions, my pint-size martinet barks, The clock is not green!shes not that into contractions, which makes her sentences sound particularly formal these days. So we wait. And as we wait, I wonder if there are other parents out there, maybe across town, or on the other side of the country, or around the world, all of us lying on the ground dutifully waiting for the almighty clock to set us free as our children go about their days. Im sure there are. I wish Id snuck my phone in with me, so I could scroll through entries on my Facebook group for mothers. Surely one of the other thirty-eight thousand strangers who occasionally give me advice could offer some help or, at the very least, commiserate. But no, my phone is covered in burp cloths on my bedside table, so Im left with my own vacuous thoughts, which soon revolve around what newborn-specific item Ill need to purchase that day. Baby Charlottes been scratching herself. At some point, Im going to have to give the worlds tiniest manicure, and before I do, I need to procure the worlds tiniest emery board. All hail Amazon.

An eternity later, the clock turns green. The digital display shows a little friendly dance of lines and dots. Elated, I yelp, Ella, its green, its green, look! But shes busy conducting an intense checkup on Willy-up, her unicorn, the clock now a distant memory. Mama, she says, throwing a hand behind her, not even making eye contact. Can you hand me the Benadryl? Willy-ups fever is twenty-twenty-eighteen.

Before Baby Charlotte was born, Dave handled the predawn wake-ups. Hed take Ella downstairs and, after numerous books and Magna-Tile castles and checkups, guiltlessly plop her in front of a few minutes of Mister Rogers Neighborhood. Or let her swipe through some of the thirty thousand photos on his phone, the vast majority of her. It wasnt like he spent the entire morning with her parked in front of a screen. But it was inevitable that when I waddled in, instead of coming upon them molding clay figurines, or mixing the dough for a skillet cornbread, or doing some other wholesome father-daughter bonding activity that could have been lifted from Laura Ingalls Wilders childhood, Id find Ella gaping at the television and him scrolling through his phone. Or hed be gaping at Mr. Rogers and shed be scrolling. Either combination I hated.

We just read Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed fifty times, Dave would protest as Fred Rogers buttoned up his cardigan and got out his guitar. He was a minister, he sings songs, lighten up. It was in these moments that I started to mull the question of just how technology should be integrated into our childs lifewhere it could help, where it could hurt. And it was a question I was forced to confront every single day, from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep. While I did my best to exist as far on the other side of the tech spectrum as possible, next to the abacus and the loom, I happened to be married to Dave, techs greatest apologist. And our clashing worldviews came head-to-head the minute Ella arrived.

* * *

A little background on the two of us: Dave and I met the last week of college, where he majored in psychology. I figured itd be good for cocktail party conversations, he once told me, though his academic rigor paled in comparison to his extracurriculars, which included singing in a tuxedo-clad a capella group (see: why we met the last week of school). A few months after graduation, he quit his stable job at a huge company and decided to join a start-up that sold mens pants exclusively online. It was the early days of e-commerce. For two years, as the company honed its strategy and fashion sense, hed come home with rejects, proudly and unironically wearing wide-wale pink corduroy pants with a fly that started at his knee or blindingly yellow chinos with one leg shorter than the other. He often looked like an actual clown. But he believed in the power of the internet to disrupt retail, and years later, the company was acquired by a huge retailer. It kick-started his love of Silicon Valley, cementing his certainty that tech could make all our lives better. He went on to join another start-up before founding his own, and now he works as a venture capitalist, spending his days meeting with and advising young guns who are dying to disrupt anythingthe dentist, the parking garagein the name of progress and convenience.

His day begins tethered to the cloud, as his Apple Watch logs data on how he slept and spits it back to him in the form of charts and graphs. Hell dutifully consult it even after an obviously terrible night, during which Charlotte and Ella trade off wake-ups until the sun rises, then glumly report through squinted eyes, It says I slept poorly. No shit, Sherlock. Next up: testing some beta-stage product. For months after Charlotte was born, before his feet even hit the floor, hed huff and puff into a device that uses a CO2 sensor to determine if your body is burning fat or carbs for fuel (tagline: Hack your metabolism). Im in ketosis! hed gloat, as Charlotte nursed furiously beside him, chowing down on a highly caloric breakfast that went directly to her thighs. On his way to the subway, hell walk, head bowed to Jobs, as he scrolls through Slack, Twitter, and his email, which contains a medley of futurist newsletters. His workday is a constant juggle of meetings and Twitter and Slack and back again, and hell often return home with some patent-pending doodad that does something I dont understand, like hold crypto currency in cold storage. A neat freak living in a Manhattan apartment with no space to spare, I throw them out with gleeful abandon, and every time he realizes one of them is missing, hell protest, But thats going to be worth something someday! (After verifying with friends of his in the tech industry, I can report that hes telling the truth approximately one out of every twenty times, a risk Im willing to take.) And bedtime happens only after that Apple Watch is locked n loaded on his wrist, so he can track just how poorly hes going to sleep.