‘iMother’ by Beth Kilkenny

iMother

My phone is feminism and it is maternity. If my phone took the Bechdel Test it would pass. Its black mirror is a deep pool of women; waving or drowning. I am drowning. My phone is a life buoy. Regrettably it is also:

A. a substance more addictive than crack cocaine

B. a portal to hell.

This is an origin story. It’s a love story. It’s a warning.

There is a holy trinity of apps on my phone: Twitter (X, whatever Elon), Instagram, email. I toggle between them constantly throughout the day, every day, all day. Looking for something: what?

On Twitter I follow mostly feminists and writers, which results in a hatred of the world or, alternatively, myself. If there was a physical place, a city or a bar, that made me feel as bad as I do when I go on Twitter, I would never go back. I certainly wouldn’t go last thing at night, and then be knocking the door down again first thing in the morning. Unless.

On Instagram I mostly follow women. Some who are like me, and some who are not; this means first thing in the morning when I look on Instagram I either see myself reflected (good self-esteem day) or see someone else being a much better version of me (immediate sense of self-loathing and inadequacy). The woman I could be, if the first thing I did every day was not to check Instagram.

I check my email on a half-hourly basis. Waiting for the news that will change my life. Dear Beth, I am pleased to tell you ... What will it be, I don’t know. It does not come. My phone is a constant reminder that Nothing Is Happening. I am waiting for something I don’t even know I want.

My phone accompanies me everywhere. When I’m not reading the internet I’m listening to it. I go for walks accompanied by raspy-voiced American heterodox journalists as they confidently espouse opinions I’m terrified I agree with. At night, they soothe me to sleep. In Tesco, I buy the same food week after week and listen to self-help podcasts. Somewhere between the flour and the tins of pineapple, Brené Brown is having a motivational conversation with a woman who believes we should all be cheetahs. I pick up some bagels, pre-sliced. In the dairy aisle, Brené moves on to mothers and daughters, and Being Good. I shudder with recognition and excessive refrigeration.

Joan Didion reports in her book The Year of Magical Thinking that her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, used to say the ability to make a note when something came to mind was the difference between being able to write or not. John Dunne used to carry old library cards to take down his ad hoc notes, which seems so much more authentic, so much more writerly, than an app on a smartphone. In the Notes app on my phone, I write poetry. I want to tell you that poetry written on the Notes app of an iPhone on a child’s bedroom floor is valid. I want to tell you I think Joan Didion would have believed this. I want to tell you that I believe this.

More to come on mothers, the internet and misogyny.

Regardless, my phone becomes a poem. I make poetry from the epic WhatsApp conversations with my best friend. They contain our hearts at their most full, and dark. They are already poems.

My favourite tweet of mine is ‘To the woman inhaling a Cadbury’s crème egg in the next car, listen I love you, joy is coming.’ It got 30 likes, which was disappointing. That was some of my best work.

Amidst it all, I shout at my children to put away the screens I have bought them as my phone hangs limply from my hand, a toxic mitten.

IRL

A few months before I got my first smartphone, my not-then-husband had acquired his own. He reminds me, with some frequency still, that my question to him before he purchased the phone was ‘Why do you want one of those?’ Around nine months earlier I had sat my not-then-husband down before we went out for dinner and told him I was pregnant. He fell back in the chair like a 1950s sitcom character. We had not yet discussed if we wanted one of those. In 2010 my eldest child was born; it was a life-changing event as one might expect. Three months later, for my 31st birthday, I got my first iPhone; it was a life-changing event, which I did not expect.

When you become a mother you are supposed to pretend you are the same person you always were, in ways you would not with other life-changing events. When you are online, you are supposed to be the same person you are in Real Life, as if we are all not a hundred different people at the same time. Which leaves me with one burning question: who even am I anyway?

When I was pregnant, I didn’t think beyond the arrival of a baby. I didn’t think I would eventually have an eleven-year-old who would sit beside me at night watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Netflix while I field questions about orgasms. I didn’t think that I would spend hours considering all the tragedies that could befall his precious head once the forceps had been removed and he was here in the world, and mine to protect, or break.

When I got my first smartphone, and found comfort in the middle of the night with podcasts or parenting forums, I didn’t think that in ten years’ time my phone would essentially have become a part of my body, that I would check it with a frequency bordering on lunatic, whilst also loathing it with every fibre of my being. But that’s how these things escalate, I suppose.

My phone and my maternal experience are intertwined. In the early days, the phone kept me company in the absence of the village; it gave me advice, a sense of community and somewhere to go when I couldn’t leave the house for longer than two hours at a time. When they were babies – my son and my smartphone – the three of us spent long dark nights together. He fed and squirmed while I listened to podcasts and scrolled one-handed through parenting forums. There was always someone awake inside my phone.

In online parenting websites you gain a new mother tongue. The new village has its own language comprised of acronyms and words people in Real Life do not use. An OP writes about TTC with her DH, waiting for a BFP after the TWW. (In motherhood I realize my voice begins to sound like my own mother. How can voices be passed down? An aural Matryoshka doll.) I spent so much time on these forums that I recognized all the regular names and knew their stories. The woman who had five children but was struggling to conceive a sixth; the woman who was in love with a female colleague at work; the woman who thought she was not like other mums and swore a lot to prove it.

In Real Life, I signed up for Baby Yoga, Baby Swimming, Baby Cinema, Baby Anything, in a desperate attempt to make connections. They did not work. I remained unconnected to Real Life. I did not like it.

We went to classes, my poor bewildered baby and me, and we sat in circles while I smiled dementedly and he clung to me wondering what on earth was going on. I scrabbled to make conversation with a woman who had paid seven hundred euro a pop for a night nurse to help her tiny baby sleep through the night. Unbeknownst to me, my baby wouldn’t sleep through the night for ten years. But this was neither here nor there since seven hundred euro for even one good night’s sleep was beyond us. I made a hasty retreat to the blue-lit comfort of my phone.

The Mothernet

Five years after I got my first iPhone, I had a second child. I was probably on my third or fourth phone. Five years is a long time on the internet, and anonymous parenting forums had made way for personality-driven social media. Motherhood and social media make perfect bedfellows. Small moments of time snatched, constantly interrupted. A child’s cry bleats out like an Instagram alert: Pay Attention To Me.

Many online mothers seemed alarmingly confident of their mothering abilities and in a permanent state of maternal bliss. I did not see myself in these women and so, with a degree of both narcissism and tedious inevitability, I started a parenting blog. In retrospect, the sense of disbelief and desperation vibrated from the screen.

I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS HAS HAPPENED TO ME.

Me, a young person! Me, an educated feminist! ‘Nobody told us,’ me and my new virtual mam friends moan to each other, as Adrienne Rich rolls over.

Adrienne Rich wrote Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution in 1977. I read it over forty years later and bells rang all through the parish. In it she describes motherhood as a patriarchal construct, and marks it out as entirely different from the maternal world that mothers actually inhabit. She wrote: ‘I believe increasingly that only the willingness to share private and sometimes painful experience can enable women to create a collective description of the world which will be truly ours.’ It’s pretty clear to me she was referring to mum bloggers when she wrote this.

On my blog I wrote about how complaining about motherhood was a feminist act, which was convenient for me as I liked to complain a lot. I wrote about how my daughter who loved pink had taught me about internalized misogyny, which was a convenient way for me to excuse myself for indulging her in lazy stereotypes. I wrote about how women who said they were not like other mums were just middle-aged versions of the cool girl and there was nothing wrong with being a mum, which was a convenient way for me to say I was not like other mums.

Researchers and academics have referred to the online life of contemporary mothers as ‘MotherSpace.’ Once you know people are writing academic texts about your behaviour you can convince yourself that you are not just ranting into the ether out of heart-clenching loneliness, but are in fact committing an important and feminist act.

Being a mother online radicalized me. At the height of the Repeal campaign, when the idea of abortion regret was regularly posited as a reason not to vote Yes, I wrote about how it should be permissible for women to express maternal regret. Women might regret having abortions, and so they might also regret having children. This is the part where I have to tell you how much I love my children.

But for a long time, I hated being a mother.

You might be scornful of mothers online. But have you considered that by sharing the complexities of the mothering experience and centring their identities as mothers, it is possible to argue that mothers online are enacting a feminist resistance to patriarchal narratives?

On the other hand, it is also the case that some mothers online are representatives of a mainstream liberal feminist narrative, and that the dominance of the white middle-class mother upholds patriarchal constructs of ‘acceptable’ motherhood. In her book Mommyblogs and the Changing Face of Motherhood, Mia Freedman writes that ‘maternal presence on the internet is a fascinating blend of patriarchy, empowerment, therapy and community.’

By this stage motherhood and the internet were inseparable for me. All my life was there. I was entirely consumed by them and when I began studying for an MA in Gender Studies, I wrote essays about the phenomenon of mothers online (see above). I talked about motherhood in seminars while the young people in my class rolled their eyes. I wrote about myself writing about mothers online. I was fascinated and disgusted and afraid, and in love with all of it.

My children became supporting characters in my maternal story.

I read about the ‘good enough’ mother, a phrase coined by British paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and now much-shared online. The good enough mother can spend hours on Instagram if she creates supportive memes for her tribe about being a good enough mother. I clung to the idea of the good enough mother, because in my heart I knew that I was nowhere near good enough. I stopped writing about motherhood when I could no longer bear the striking disparity between the mother I was writing about and the mother I was proving to be.

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

Like all addicts I have periods of abstinence. I delete the apps off my phone. I watch BBC documentaries about the Philadelphia District Attorney which require my full attention. The phone sits silently beside me. My arm reaches out for it, even though I am focusing hard on DA Larry Krasner’s attempt to bring criminal justice reform to Philadelphia. I tap it, bring it to life, but it’s a shadow of its former self. I check my email. I read the headlines in the one news app I allow myself. I look at photos of my children, who have stretched away from me.

I put the phone down.

Now that I’m not online, I read novels about women who are Extremely Online. The novels are written in short bursts so you know it’s about the internet. The characters are young, a little unlikeable. Women are allowed to be unlikeable now. (But maybe only if they are also young?) I try and remember to remove the exclamation marks from my WhatsApp messages.

I decide that the reason I spend so much time online is because I have nothing to do with my hands while I’m watching Netflix in the evenings. As if what draws me to constantly trawl social media websites is some kind of learned muscle memory rather than an acquired need for constant new information, or the momentary dopamine hit of a like from someone I’ve never met and likely never will.

I take up word searches. There’s a book lying around that was given to one of the children for Christmas, but they haven’t touched it because they’re watching YouTube. The book contains puzzles of words grouped together by category. One evening, in the bleak winter of the second wave of the pandemic, I come across the category ‘Everything’s bleak’. In my mind I take a picture of it to share on Instagram, and caption it ‘Mood.’ Cheerless, leaden, wan.

I finish the word search book and with my hands no longer distracted I fall off the wagon. I reinstall, delete. Reinstall, delete. I post tweets and pictures and delete them minutes later, like a toddler desperate for attention who hides behind her mother’s leg when she gets it.

Then it’s summer, and my children spend hours playing outside with their friends as if it were 1987. I spend two weeks offline, like an analogue angel. Life is quieter, calmer. I delete my blog from the internet. From this distance I feel ashamed of the intensity of those words, even while remembering it was shame that I was trying to combat in writing them, even while reproducing them here. In the absence of social media apps I still cannot leave my phone alone. I still reach for it, unthinkingly, and it was always there, less than an arm’s length away. I scroll through old photos and read old words. I can’t tell the things I love from the things I hate; they are the same things. I still don’t know what I’m looking for.

From issue #16: autumn/winter 2023

About the Author
Beth Kilkenny writes and lives in Dublin. She has been published in The Waxed Lemon and Sonder, amongst other journals in print and online. Beth was a winner of the Books Ireland Flash Fiction Competition in 2022. In 2021/22 she was an awardee of the Words Ireland mentorship programme.