domestic monastery

or, how much of the internet can I remove from my home?

At the beginning of my older kids’ summer break, we spent a week at the beach. While we were there we saw an old friend of my husband’s, and at some point during the course of the evening he asked me about the book I wrote. My brain had to buffer for like a full five seconds before remembering that, oh yeah, I published a book last year. I’m proud of it and all, but I so quickly forgot about it once it was released into the world. 

I am proud of the book, I promise, but not as proud as I expected to be. Having a baby right after my book came out was such a stark comparison, a material accomplishment butting up against an essentially eternal accomplishment. It makes my heart race to write these words because this isn’t something that I, a 21st century woman, should feel! But here’s what happened: I published The Contemplative Tarot, thought to myself hm that was nice, and then sort of shrugged and moved on. This isn’t to say that I don’t want to write anymore. I would probably like to write more books someday. What it is to say is that I have two older children and a baby right now, and they take up most of my time, and that’s okay and good. It’s a relief, really. I don’t feel any burden right now to keep up with this substack or come up with other book ideas or further any sort of career. My book will be ashes someday but my children are immortal souls destined to dwell in the house of the Lord forever. From that perspective, it’s easy to see what my priority should be. 

As a result, I’ve been hyper-focused on my children lately, but I’m enjoying it, mostly because I’m allowing myself to be “just a mom” without any internal pressure to be anything else. My inner life is as rich and creative as ever, it’s just that right now that creativity is oriented toward our family life and how to make it both richer and more cohesive. 

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For Lent this year, I turned my smartphone into a dumbphone. I removed the internet from my phone and deleted any app that caused me to spend any significant time on my phone. I did this for a couple of reasons. I realized that I was spending too much time on my phone, and especially that I was using my phone to disassociate when I was overstimulated or upset about something. I also wanted to set an example for my older kids – they’re 8 and 10 and old enough to have friends with phones and to start wondering when they’ll get smartphones (the answer is a very long time from now, if ever). For me, it was hard and then it was amazing. My favorite part was completely turning off my phone for long stretches. I had forgotten how clean and clear my brain felt without constant access to distraction. It was lovely to take myself back to a time when I wasn’t preoccupied with digital presence. I loved it so much that I kept my phone this way, pared down to nothing but the most essential apps that don’t drive me to distraction (maps, banking, texting). 

In spending less time on my smartphone, it made me think about the effect my phone use has had on my kids. And I’m not even speaking about how much time I spent on my phone. Everyone knows that it’s bad to spend too much time on one’s phone around one’s kids. I’m speaking more so about the ways in which I used my phone, the ubiquity of it in my life. In other words, it made me realize how much of my life was digital and therefore inaccessible to my kids. 

I recently deleted my private Instagram where I kept photos of my kids. The only people who had access to it were family members and close friends, but I started to feel not-great about having even private photos of my kids on the internet, so I deleted it and printed all 1,500 photos in Chatbooks. Now I make a Chatbook every month and it’s mailed to us and all our Chatbooks live on a shelf in our living room. My older kids look through these Chatbooks all the time and absolutely delight in them. Obviously, when all my photos were on Instagram they had no access to them; the photos weren’t even a part of their reality. 

Our music-listening habits have been another example of this. When we listen to music at home, we use Spotify on my husband’s phone. But because of that, our kids have no access to browsing or choosing music for themselves. There’s no way for them to explore that because it’s all coming from a phone, a device we don’t want them to use. To remedy this, we’re planning on buying a record player. (Yes we could buy a CD player but I’m not above aesthetics and I think it’s a net good that record players require a little more work to use, forcing a listener into a time and place in an even more extreme way than CDs do, instead of letting algorithmic playlists wash over them in a sort of passive listening, which is also why I think Spotify is bad.) Part of this is because I want my kids to have a working understanding of classical music, which is my educational background, and the experience of listening to classical music specifically on Spotify is frustrating for all sorts of reasons. But mostly it’s so we can go to bookstores and music stores and buy records that we can have on the shelf for my kids to physically pick up and look through and listen to. 

There are other examples of this too: having shelves and shelves of books instead of buying kindles for the kids, shopping at the grocery store instead of ordering groceries online, owning more board games than video games, cooking from cookbooks more often than I cook from internet recipes.

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To be honest, I’m starting to get a little weird about how much I hate the internet. We’re not Luddites: we have a TV that’s used for watching Austin FC games and WWII documentaries, and as I write this the baby is napping and my older kids are playing Mario Strikers together on the Nintendo. But my goal lately is to have as little digital influence in our lives as I possibly can.

I joke with my husband all the time about turning our home into a domestic monastery, but I’m not really joking. I think that the mass is the most beautiful, real, transcendent thing in the entire world. I want, as much as possible, for my life and my husband’s life and my children’s lives to feel as transcendent as the mass does. I want them to live lives that are embodied and intentional and beautiful, which means that I want them to have lives that are not lived online. I’ve written before that I’m preoccupied by the question of what it means to pray without ceasing, and I think this is one piece of that puzzle. The material world is as holy as can be, and I want to show my kids how to live like that’s true.