One Mom's Love/Hate Relationship With the Internet

As a mother who works part-time, there are days I have time for the Internet and days I don't. Most days I wonder, where do people get that time?

I love Twitter, but it can annoy me to even open it, knowing I don't have any time to read the links. At a glance I can tell if something is happening, news-wise, but that's about it.

When I'm home and doing chores while my toddler plays, I can get in a rut of checking Facebook every five minutes. Surely everyone does this, but at home, it seems especially pathetic. I irritate myself when there's nothing new on Facebook. I get superjudgmental about how dumb the links are and whose vacations hopefully tank.

Yet, while moving through the day with kids, my phone is sometimes the only thing I feel like I have time for, time to get a break, to read that post (dammit!) or to say hi to a friend, to make someone laugh. I send text messages. We'll FaceTime with a grandparent. I'll upload a kid pic to Instagram. And then the day gets going, a kid comes home from school, etc., and I lose track of where my phone is until dinnertime.

I didn't have a smartphone when my first daughter was born. Not until she was 18 months old. I remember the first two apps she played with — Itsy Bitsy Spider and Tozzle Puzzle — and what a miracle it was. With my second daughter, born in 2013, I have had many more moments of consciously choosing between attention or my phone. My 5-year-old says now, "Mom! Take a picture!" as if the phone is just a part of my hand. There are times when my phone needs attention — a call, a reply — but for the most part, it doesn't.

And then there is nap time. It can be just long enough to clean up lunch, take care of one or two things that need to be done, and sit down. Feed myself. Maybe write an email. Maybe read one article. That's it. But say I get a long nap. Say I get two hours! I may read the whole time. I may do work. But if I end up on the Internet, my habits are predictable as sin. I read some fashion, sports, news, and literature. If I'm looking not to read, I usually end up with interiors and haircuts, because such posts abound.

I specifically avoid Pinterest. I used to be satisfied by the beauty the Internet presented. That house. That room. That table. And then I got a house and realized how stressful and costly it is to look at others' better spaces — both IRL and emotionally. The things you thought were purely beautiful turn out to be, on an afternoon at home with your toddler, in the midst of a real mess, just oppressive.

Things I wish the Internet would stop showing me:

• Beautiful Scandinavian interiors. They are white. That's about it.
• Lists. (Ha.) The lists are attractive, even compelling, but the constant advice can be tiring.
• Antlers on side tables, antlers on walls, nontrophy animals on walls. It has become a ridiculous Internet cliché.
• Kids making beautiful crafts. If your kids' craft is Internet beautiful, Pinterest-worthy, then you did it. Not them.
• Kids with careers. WTF?
• Videos of animals I must see. The wacky behavior may be funny, but it only reminds me how weird my child is.
• Moms with beautiful blogs. Can we reinvent this whole category? More ugliness please.
• Bloggers in France. See above.

We all go looking for beauty in these images, I think, to please us. To make parenting at home feel less solitary and more adult. And yet as I've grown accustomed to what's there and what's not there, I increasingly crave a kind of bare ugliness. A certain uncute humanity. Something less curated, and damn that word, too. The less perfect. What do you look for? What do you find?