MY BELOVED KINDLE is dying. Not in an obnoxious way, but in a very dignified and self-sacrificing ‘go on without me’ kind of way.
It just quietly announced that, from the end of this month, it will no longer be accepting any new updates and will be severing any and all connections to the modern world from that point.
I think I am mostly just surprised because I didn’t realise that was an option. I can remember my granny going through something similar. This was a woman who raised four children without social media. Just imagine that. Imagine raising children without listening to a single parenting podcast, without knowing the scourge of gentle parenting or reward charts.
Now, admittedly, she never had to worry about a plastic water bottle breaking down internally and living in her child forever; she also never had to explain to a toddler why they couldn’t watch YouTube at 4 am. But she also had to navigate raising four children, working her entire life, buying a house, moving country with the aforementioned four offspring, moving back to Ireland and generally just surviving into her 80s without any assistance.
By the time I knew her, though, she had stopped participating in a large amount of day-to-day life. She refused to open the post, for example. She would leave it on a table in the hall for my mam to sift through and explain the main points of.
She also viewed the TV remote as something that had come from NASA. She would regularly ring my mam and say, ‘I pushed a button, and now the picture is gone’, and we would all have to trek over there and turn the teletext off. Again.
Eventually, my mam just sellotaped a piece of paper around the whole remote, only leaving the ‘on’ and ‘volume’ buttons exposed.
At that time, I thought my mam knew absolutely everything that there was to know in the world, and to be fair, she did. She could fix any technology, understand every kind of letter and always knew what had to be done.
Computer says no
Now, the roles have reversed. Recently, she got me to come over because she had to call their alarm company. Unfortunately, they would only speak to the account holder.
They asked her to confirm her address. She looked at me. I looked back at her. She covered a non-existent mouthpiece on her phone, and stage whispered: ‘What do I say?’
Your address. You tell him your address. I know you know this.
And it’s not just my mam. I recently endured the horror of bringing my dad through airport security. The same man who brought our entire family through various airports on holiday, who would switch between different languages easily, and who could also rent cars in other countries and seamlessly drive on opposite sides of the road as needed, I watched this same man experience a full-body freeze when asked ‘purpose of travel’ and then proceed to tell the security guard both of our entire life stories.
I have friends who aim to be out of the country if elderly relatives plan on buying any new technology. It doesn’t matter if it’s a blender or a new phone; they will lose an entire weekend, and I think it’s fair to say we all live in dread of anyone’s parents needing to use a two-factor authentication site (looking directly at you, Revenue).
I used to find it funny. I thought I would never be like that. New things are exciting! I lived through the rise and fall of skinny jeans, going from baggy to skinny and then back to baggy again. Bodies also had a similar trajectory, going from 90s heroin chic to very much inclusive and healthy, and then sadly back to heroin chic. And I persisted.
I also had to adjust from a Walkman that gave me minor electrical shocks every few minutes, to iPods and again to AirPods. We went from VHS tapes (and don’t even try to tell me you can’t still smell Xtra Vision) to DVDs, to destroying the entire family PC with the computer equivalent of an STD after trying to illegally download songs from the dodgiest of websites, to somehow now owning nothing because everything exists online and there’s an app for that.
Coming full circle
Then parenting hit me with the gentle force of a sledgehammer. I have now spent over 16 years being forced to learn everything there was to know. Tummy time, sleeping schedules, and wake windows, PE days, colour-coordinated Sports Days. I waste at least 47% of my brain power deciding on what to make for dinner, and now, apparently, I also need to know the symptoms of Lyme Disease.
According to a 2024 University of Bath study, mothers carry around 71% of the household “mental load”, which is all the invisible organising, remembering, planning and anticipating involved in running family life. You know, the really fun stuff.
So it’s not that I don’t care what comes next, it’s that I am so very tired. I have had to cram a lifetime’s worth of thinking into 16 years, and I just don’t have the capacity to onboard anything else new. I have already learned too much. I am out of storage space.
We recently bought a new washing machine, and the salesperson excitedly told me that it can connect to my phone. That it has its own app. I felt like walking into the sea. I don’t want another app. I don’t want another upgrade.
No, the way I see it is that I have another few years before I can join my Kindle and make a quiet announcement of my own. “I’m so sorry, I am no longer compatible with modern devices”, or “I am out of storage, I don’t have the capacity for new things”.
I’ll ring my kids, crying because the fridge has texted me and I am frightened.
I can’t wait.
Margaret Lynch is a mother of two and a parenting columnist with The Journal.