Parental (Self) Controls

View of the jetty, Morecambe. You can see the Irish Sea and the Lake District Fells in the background.

I’ve re-instituted my use of “parental controls” on my own smartphone. I have massively reduced the amount of time I am “allowed” to access the Substack or Facebook apps. I can adjust the settings at any time, but the shame of flicking that timer button once more is enough to keep my twitching hands at bay. Mostly. I shouldn’t need these controls, surely?

Parental controls are designed to stop children, the same creatures who will go full Bruce Bogtrotter on any cake if left to their own devices, who refuse to sleep until they cry with exhaustion, who will sprint through a sunny day and forget to drink a single drop of water unless instructed to by an anxious parent. And yet, I find I cannot trust myself with a smartphone. What little free time gets pissed up the wall, scrolling, ever scrolling. Some of the time is spent reading Substack essays, so I can congratulate myself on using at least three brain cells for that. But so much is just a pathetic scrabble for dopamine. A beautiful place I’ll never visit. Friends I’ll never see again. Fascinating people I’ll never meet. Food I’ll never cook. Arguments I should not involve myself in.

I took my son to the seaside earlier this week, just for a pleasant day out. I packed a lunch, slathered us both in Factor 50, and pootled along to the Promenade. We had a marvellous time, to start. I only nearly lost him to the quicksand once. I wish I could say that I were joking, but I’m not. He stood in a six-inch deep depression in the sand, very close to the shoreline and far from the sea. I stopped to take a photo, and within two seconds, he was sinking fast. I chucked my phone down and grabbed his little arms, yanking him out to safety. His feet were entirely hidden by two mounds of mud that stretched halfway up his calves. I exhaled. A crab scuttled out of his shoe/mud-pile, and he cried, but only for a moment. I cleaned my son up and we carried on.

Evidence for the Social Services, pt1. If you look closely, you can see him beginning to sink. I should have realised before he got in - what else would such a depression in the sand mean?

I soon lost my phone and began to trek with increasing panic back and forth over the sand, losing hope by the minute. A kind older man with his little granddaughter joined me in my search. He soon came up with an excellent idea – he called my number. My hand, resting on my backpack, began to vibrate. Yes, dear readers, I had indeed gone full retard. It was in my bag; the same bag that I had already emptied out in my search four times. I burst into tears and threatened to kiss the poor man, but he settled for giving me a pitying hug instead. I thanked him and his now slightly frightened looking granddaughter profusely and we went our separate ways.

By the time I got home, I was a wreck. While both little incidents would normally unsettle me a little bit, particularly the quicksand, they would not normally leave me in a semi-useless state. I sat on the kitchen floor with my little boy and recounted the day’s events to my husband, ending with the statement: “I think I need a holiday from myself”. It hit me then, that having lost two pregnancies and two jobs in the space of six months might have taken more of a toll on me than I had thought.

I had already begun to suspect that I wasn’t quite stable when a woman called me “pretty” in a supermarket a few days prior, and my response had been to burst into tears. At the very least, I managed to get to the doors before wobbling, but still. Hardly an appropriate response to an unexpected compliment. I’m sorry if this seems like a “humblebrag”, but the truth is that I was genuinely shocked.

And here I am, oversharing. It’s all I know. The point is that I need to become more solid. Partly, I need a bit more time to recover. I need to adjust to the next phase of living, the new routine. I’ve provisionally managed to find replacement work, so that side of things is looking up at least. But I think I need to reduce my time spent on social media significantly, at least until I feel sensible enough to trust myself to have self-control and not to make myself feel worse unnecessarily.

I have some Substack pieces in the pipeline that I’m quite pleased with, some free, some paid, so I will post those as the weeks go on. I will still allow myself to use the Substack App as well – it is how I read all of your wonderful essays, and I enjoy the brief commentary and conversations afforded by Notes. But I will stick to using parental controls on my phone, so my presence will be much lighter.

I hope you are all having a wonderful summer, and that you stick with me for some hopefully more interesting pieces in the near future.