A Desert for Reflection

breaking up with my phone for Lent

Woman and Child Seated in a Garden, Mary Cassatt

Today is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent, the forty-day time of spiritual preparation before Easter. I’ll admit that I’ve struggled with Lent the last few years. This is the third Lent in the last four years during which I’ll be pregnant – my pregnancies aren’t very difficult, but even an uncomplicated pregnancy is its own ascetic practice. During these years, I never know what to give up for Lent that will have any spiritual impact, because I already feel like I’m giving up a lot in this season of life!¹

I took some time last week to think and pray about what is really hindering my spiritual life right now, because truly, it does feel hindered! I’ve felt tired and distracted and a little blue in the way I always do in the winter and like meaningful prayer feels very distant. I’ve been assuming that all these feelings are the fault of my children, who ask so much of me. Of course it’s the little ones who are making me feel tired and overstimulated and brain-foggy and vaguely resentful! Of course it’s all of my responsibilities! 

Surprise! It’s not my kids making me feel this way! It’s my phone. I need to give up my phone for Lent. 

My phone has become an annoying problem, both practically and spiritually. My baby often tries to grab it when I have it in my hand. My toddler, whose greatest ambition is to be the star of the Show of Life, asks me to turn it off any time she sees me using it. I could be setting a better example of phone use for my older kids. And having my phone on and with me all the time doesn’t even make me feel good! It makes me feel actively bad – overstimulated and grumpy and mentally fragmented and less present for my life, a life that I do actually enjoy on the whole! 

I’ve struggled for years with setting good boundaries around phone use, cycling through periods of healthy limited phone use and then falling off the wagon. I have tried almost every tactic that Catherine Shannon mentioned in this piece with the exception of finally getting a dumbphone (mostly because, among other reasons [the other reasons being that I am weak] I have a smartphone that works fine and I tend towards frugality and so I’ve resisted the idea of buying a new dumbphone when I have a perfectly useable phone already), and none of them have worked long-term. It’s not like I’m spending eight hours a day on my phone – I’m simply too busy – but it still feels like such an annoyance for me, because I am very disciplined in other areas of my life.

My own parenting and spiritual life has been heavily influenced by Ronald Rolheiser’s Domestic Monastery. I’ve read it multiple times because it’s very small and therefore perfect to hold and read while nursing a baby.² Rolheiser writes about the home as a domestic monastery:

Certain vocations – for example, raising children – offer a perfect setting for living a contemplative life. They provide a desert for reflections, a real monastery. The mother who stays home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. Her existence is certainly monastic. Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from the centers of social life and from the centers of important power. She feels removed.

I would like to write more about this at some point, but to brief here because this isn’t what this little post is about: last summer I gave birth to our fourth baby, and there has been something about the fourth baby that has changed me, and is continuing to change me, dramatically. I think it has to do with moving into mothering what is a large number of children by most people’s standards, and also the particularities of the fourth baby herself – she is a happy baby but so very sensitive and quiet and watchful. And now I’m pregnant with another baby due late this summer! So much delicious, riotous growth happening right now in my life and the life of my family!³

The idea of the domestic monastery has been helpful for me in pinpointing why my phone use has been making me feel so emotionally and spiritually restless. For a long time the idea of the domestic monastery felt like just that, a nice idea. Now it feels unavoidably real. My life is monastic right now. My responsibilities are largely removed from everything that is happening outside of my home. The phone creates friction because, every time I check it, I’m mentally leaving the monastery. As it turns out, I don’t have the energy for anything that is ever happening on the internet and precious little energy for anything that is happening outside of my immediate family. I cannot even pretend to keep one foot in the world during this season of my life, but I also don’t need to pretend! For whom am I pretending? Certainly not myself — I don’t want to be pulled out of my daily life at home right now.

So, what I will essentially be doing during Lent is turning off my phone so I can stay in the monastery. Because I like it when people give me practical ideas, practically speaking, here’s what I’ll be doing: 

1. I’ll be turning off my phone completely during the hours that my toddler is awake, because she is most sensitive to my phone use. This will be roughly 7 am-7pm, because she unfortunately is usually too busy seizing the day to take naps anymore. I almost never want to be on my phone after she goes to bed because I am also tired by that point in the evening, so in practice, my phone will probably be on only for a few hours a day in the early morning.

2. I’ll use my laptop to check emails and texts once or twice a day, probably around lunchtime and before I start dinner in the evening so I’m not completely unavailable to family and friends. I’ve never in my entire life felt an impulse to scroll endlessly on my laptop (I don’t know why my laptop doesn’t sing the same siren song as my phone but it does not!) so I think this will work. 

3. I’ll allow myself the occasional bending of these rules when I need to, say, pick up a family member at the airport or call a friend to catch up. I’ll also take my phone with me when I’m out and about, though I’ll be leaving it turned off unless there’s some kind of wild emergency. And truly, I spend most of my time at home right now anyway.

4. The other day I came across a piece by Alex Kaschuta that helped me understand why my phone has been such a temptation to me lately. It’s about Baby Jail, and contaminated time, and how and why the smartphone feels like such an easy companion during seasons of life caring for young children. To work around that temptation, I’ve chosen other things I can do with my half-free, oft-interrupted time: flipping through magazines, reading uncomplicated books, journaling, working on a simple knitting project for a friend.

5. The most persistent excuse I’ve used to justify having my phone on and with me at all times is the desire to take pictures of my kids. This excuse is silly because I have an actual camera, a nice little point-and-shoot Canon that takes lovely pictures, so I’ll be using that instead.

This whole experiment feels extreme enough that I probably won’t be able to continue it past Lent except in some modified form, but I want to see what happens when I let myself be in my little domestic monastery instead of trying to distract myself from it any time I’m bored or restless. I feel strongly that this place — this home filled with funny, sweet, sometimes loud but always exuberant children — is where God is trying to meet me right now if I would only let myself really be here.

1. It’s been recommended to me that I add spiritual practices instead of taking things away, but honestly, adding responsibilities to my life feels like a recipe for failure and not what God is asking of me. I am the queen of Doing Too Much and I’m trying to relinquish that title.

2. This is currently the only criteria for my spiritual reading: can it be held with one hand while nursing a baby?

3. To briefly answer the burning questions that I’ve found people can’t help but ask: Yes I did get pregnant again very quickly, yes it was a surprise but the good kind of surprise, no I wouldn’t call it unplanned because it was certainly planned by God, yes we’re excited because my husband and I have deliberately oriented our lives in such a way that we can welcome babies with more joy than anxiety. Another thing I would love to write about at some point!