Opinion: Let's learn to put down the phone and be present and focused on our children

My daughter stands on the edge of the YMCA pool, wearing hot pink goggles above cold, purpling lips. “I can’t make myself do it,” she mutters. “I can’t make myself do it.” And then she does make herself do it. She hurls forward into the water with a splash.

I’m trying to remember backward to a time when I loved pools. Instead I recall mandatory swim class in elementary school. Back then I hated rhythmic breathing. I always ended up taking on water and sputtering to the top. Because I’m not a dolphin.

But I have kids, and so I swim. Back and forth, around in circles, treading water while waiting for her to jump. I watch minutes tick by on the huge clock on the wall. How will I survive swimming for an entire hour and a half with nothing to read, nothing to cook, nothing to wash?

And nothing to scroll. Around the 45 minute mark, I realize what I miss is my phone, which you can’t take in a pool. I miss Instagram. Gmail. Realtor.com.

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My daughter pops her head out of the water. “I saw something under there!”

Play is the parent’s work, so I match her enthusiasm and cry, “What did you see?”

This game is a hit and will last the rest of the evening. She jumps. She peers through her goggles. She sees something. She comes up rejoicing to tell me: “A boy touching the bottom! A man with patterned shorts—pineapples!” This development delights me. I want to teach her to observe. When she gets bored in waiting rooms or the car, I sometimes ask her to write down what she hears, smells, feels and sees. Every time she jumps in the pool she has a new report: The boy. The man. The girl. The woman carrying the water weights. Pineapple man again.

Thrilled with her new ability to jump, she asks, “Can you take a video of me? So I can show Daddy and so I can see the splash?”

She expects this appendage, the phone, to be attached to me already. But I have to get out in the cold, slosh over to the bench, unzip my coat pocket, and then unlock the cracked screen with wet fingers.

“Are you ready yet?” she keeps asking, shivering.

Earlier in the afternoon, I was reading about the medieval conception of time. Before the invention of the mechanical clock, you might have died of the bubonic plague after a lifetime of lice and no toothbrushes. But apparently you also didn’t feel busy. No email to agitate you. Your hand didn’t seem naked without a phone in it. And, I read, you felt at one with the reality of life. No ticking. No peering up at the wall while you swim with your kids. Just being where you are. Just being there. Maybe I should mimic my medieval forebears. Maybe it should always take this long to reach my phone.

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Back to those elementary swim class school days I’m remembering. WWJD bracelets were all the rage then among the crowd at my Wesleyan Methodist Sunday school. You were supposed to glance at your wrist, see the letters, and ask yourself, “What Would Jesus Do?”

I don’t have a WWJD bracelet anymore. But I’m still imagining what Jesus would do here, if He were me. If He were a mother. We know what Jesus said about children: “Let the little children come to me.” I feel fairly sure He would not give my child a half-listening mmm hmm. He would look my child in the eye.

After taking the video, I set the phone back down. This setting down of the phone is about to become a regular rhythm of my life, one I have to learn. Sometimes it feels as against nature as rhythmic breathing. I’ll begin putting my phone away for an entire day each week. For me. For my kids. And because, WWJD.

Mothers have to embrace their finitude. It’s the only way to survive. I can’t be perpetually undistracted. But I can do better. I even enjoy trying.

Open swim winds up. “Wanna jump one more time?”

She frowns.

I negotiate. “Five more times.”

And she’s off with a grin, flying forward as far as she can, splatting down belly-first, nose plugged.

I ask, “What did you see that time?”

She says, “That time, I saw you.”

Chelsea Boes lives in Arden and works as a writer for WorldKids Magazine in Biltmore Village.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Opinion: Put down the phone and be present, focusing on the moment