My daughter steals my iPhone when she's bored. I keep taking all the games off, and she keeps putting them back on. I don't like to play video games, and they suck a ton of space.
Every time she grabs it, I think about how much she could learn about me if she wanted to.
How much of ourselves we carry around on these little machines. Not only whom we call but how we choose to name those people in our contact lists. I actually labeled Beloved as "husband" in my contact list because I am a paranoid worrier and I thought it would be handy for someone searching through my phone to figure out whom to call when they found my mangled body by the side of the road.
(those are called "instrusive thoughts," but at least I have my husband labeled in my phone)
I have receipts for all her birthday presents in my gmail, as well as long conversations I've had with friends about different aspects of parenting her. My banking app tells how much money we do or don't have. My pedometer shows how far I ran last, how long it took me to do it and what the altitude of my climb amounted to before I was done. And that's not even touching Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads.
I wonder if she realizes all this information about her mother is in her hands when she opens the Games folder and chooses between Monster Hair, Crazy Facts or Subway Surf. I don't ask, because I don't want to plant that suggestion. And yes, I often think about whether or not I want to give voice to something I don't want someone to do because I'm afraid the mere mention of that thing will make them stop at nothing to achieve it.
So I do what I usually do when I'm having intrusive thoughts, which is to tell myself thinking that thing is completely ridiculous and nobody else would even have that thought. And I hand over the phone and hope she doesn't realize how much of our personalities we store in those little glass rectangles.
