My Mom Has an i-Phone

My mother got a new cell phone this week and did not give me the number.

This is more a sign of how busy my mom is and not a comment on our relationship. I don't think.

But the reason I blog about this is not that I feel rejected at being suddenly unable to reach her. I am reeling because my mother now owns an iPhone.

My mother, who once sent me off to college with a second-hand computer she bought me, and didn't include any of the connecting cords. "Cords?" she said, mystified, when I called her. "What cords?"

As far as I know her computer knowledge has not increased a great deal since then, but suddenly, she is at my house searching for Bengal NFL highlights to show me on her phone. She still doesn't actually know how to do this ("What's the difference between google and You Tube?". And now she has a much, much better and more advanced phone than I do.

My phone -- very cute, very small, turquoise (bad for attracting police officers as I recently wrote in "Put Your Hands Where I Can See Them") -- does not have the Internet, or picture mail, or GPS. It has no apps. I can make phone calls on it. I can text. That's it. We were out recently with friends, and told them we needed to get home and bid because our e-bay auction was about to close, and they said, "Just bid from your phone!"

Uh, our phones don't do that.

I'm seeing a bad trend going on. Technology is whooshing past me, and though I felt sort of proud of it for a while down deep in my nouveau bohemian soul, I'm starting to feel a little odd and conflicted.

Hubby's parents both have iPhones too, and iPads. When the kids go to their house, they want to play ipad games. This really bugs me (no offense, Grammy and Grampy). 1) Because grandparents are for teaching kids to do old-fashioned things like play checkers and embroidery (which they do actually do). And 2) I'm looking to our parents to help us raise our kids in a low-tech, slower, simpler lifestyle.

I'm swimming against a colossal current, I know.. But I'm so addicted to my at-home e-mail, I get sucked into facebook, and I'm way more into this blog than any of my reader are, that the last thing I want is e-mail on my phone. Or my kids playing tablet games. I don't want to be totally plugged in (which is an archaic term in the age of wireless technology) every where I go. I really, really hate seeing children playing games on their parents' smart phones in shopping carts or in restaurants (I'm talking three year olds, not teenagers), and I know how judgmental that sounds. But we are raising an entire generation that doesn't know how to be present and is constantly looking at a screen.

So here I am, a voice crying -- or at least whimpering -- in the wilderness, posting to my blog that is sadly lacking in links or cool graphics, knowing that I have lost almost all the battles and certainly will lose the war.

Now I'll go e-mail this post to my mom. She will probably read it on her new iPhone, if she can figure out how. Love you, mommy. Please text me your new number.