Some muddled thoughts that I’ve turned into a messy braided essay this Sunday.

I never liked oranges, with all of the slow labor required to peel them, the cartilage of their innards more stubborn than I’ve ever been. I hate the white strings of the peel stuck to the juicy insides like the adhesive of a cheap Band-Aid. Separating out a wedge always covers my hands in tacky residue, the table covered in juice that lingers for a week. The wedge is usually delicious—sure—but there are countless easier means to that end.

*

I’m walking on the bright white concrete, my phone framed by either side of my hands, my e-mail up, thumbs tapping. I look up to find a van stalling, waiting for me to cross the road. Embarrassed, I rush to the other side of the street, nodding to them in thankfulness. As soon as my feet move from blacktop to sidewalk again, my neck cranes to stare at my tiny square screen. I finish the e-mail and then put the phone in my sweaty bra so that I won’t look at it again for the rest of the walk. I fish it out less than ten minutes later, after the urge to do so feels like a low hum of radio static that makes it impossible to concentrate. I only glance at the floppy irises in bloom in passing.

*

The podcast guest scoffs.

“The other day on the bus,” she says, “I saw this woman pull out an iPad for her tantruming toddler. You know, they need to build up this skill too.”

“But I wonder if this is a bigger problem than that parent,” the host says. “I’ve been known to pull out an iPad–or a phone–to keep mine quiet. But that’s just as much about our culture as it is about technology. No one has the patience to listen to a screaming toddler on a bus anymore.”

“I don’t mean to blame parents,” the guest walks her statement back slowly, “I’m just saying, that’s a good opportunity to teach our children boredom. To let them build that boredom muscle.”

“I just don’t know that making parents feel worse in this already unsupported environment is the answer,” the host says as I nod hard enough to crack my neck.

*

I order the dark fudge brownie and the chocolate cookie speckled with walnuts and stand near the counter to wait, pulling out the bright screen of my phone to scroll as I wait. Desserts in hand, I walk outside to the table I’m sharing with a friend for our al fresco lunch. His chin isn’t tilted toward his chest as mine was minutes ago; his neck is stick-straight, proud and tall, and his gaze is forward. There is no phone in his palm, no tiny computer to deliver morphine like a drip, only our outside world: the early-spring breeze, the muffled honking from the busy intersection next to the table, the slight sway of the budding bright-yellow daffodils in the newly-mulched bed across the street. He sits silently, waiting for me, his hands in his lap.

*

I finally delete Instagram. Like all breakups, what seemed to happen all at once had been building for some time. At first, I lost interest in pretending to care about an old high school acquaintance’s baby’s new tooth so she could repay the favor at some later date. Our children would never stop getting new teeth.

At a conference in October, just as the leaves were changing from yellow-delicious to dark gold, I saw a person I had been following on the app for over a decade. I had liked her posts since we were in graduate school together, knew about her dog and her husband and her hikes, and still, I couldn’t force myself to say hello. I had spent hours of my life watching the hours of the life she documented and all of it was a wash–an exercise in futility–because I didn’t really want a real connection with her, even when the universe served me the chance.

So I tried to change the purpose of my account, reasoning that if I unfollowed people that were no longer in my life, and made all of my posts about writing and only followed other writers, I could contain the mess. But by that time the people that made the app had made it impossible. There was no way to only see updates from your favorite authors when the algorithm knew you hated your body. No way to limit notifications to new books when the algorithm knew you were self-conscious about your parenting decisions. No way to capture a tablespoon from a hurricane. The Discover tab was my own curated cave of shame: others dressing in clean lines that showcased their taut wastes, tackling tantrums and deadlines in white-washed homes.

*

One week a friend brings over cara cara oranges, already peeled and stored in glass Tupperware. Their orange insides are flamingo pink and twice as sweet. That first bite, the pop of the slippery square in my mouth, is better than candy. What tartness the orange has is relegated to the background, playing bass to the showstopping guitar strings of sweet citrus.

*

The sunset the night after Mom’s final chemo session is like a firework. Pastel pinks and purples backlit by gold. It is magnified by the bare trees, as if they are waiting to bloom so that I can see the whole sky. I stare out the glass front door, my black tennis shoes on the rug next to me, and consider going outside.

I’m embarrassed by the first thought that bubbles up: the sunset will happen again tomorrow.

*

I tap my brake at the stoplight and see the hunter green Subaru next to me, the nursing license plate familiar from daycare drop offs. I almost say “Olive, there’s your friend from school!” to my kid bopping to the radio in the back seat but something stops me. I stop and glance over at a mom I vaguely know, her small frame and auburn hair identical to her daughter’s.

I’ll wave, I think, if she looks this way. But as the mom looks around the cab of her car, her gaze is directed at the floor. She pulls her cell phone out of her black purse on the passenger’s seat. I look up at the still-red light and then look back at her. She smiles at the tiny screen, her thumbs manic in their need to type something. I think of the times I’ve done the same thing–a quick text or Spotify change wouldn’t hurt as long as the light is red, I reasoned.

The light turns green and we both start our forward momentum, her SUV in the left lane moving a little more slowly than mine. In the middle of morning rush hour, we are surrounded by dozens of cars on either side of each of us. She looks down at the phone, then up at the road, then down again. One hand keeps typing while the other grips the steering wheel. I pass her so that I can merge toward the daycare. But first I look in her backseat and again notice little ones in car seats, both of them just like mine.

*

Correlation is not causation, Jonathan Haidt has made a leap that is unfounded many of the parenting blogs say. Technological abstinence isn’t the answer, they claim. In my chest, the part that tightens when I think of the life I want for my kids, I feel that his critique of kids’ use of phones and social media is misplaced judgement. Those are the symptoms, the underlying disease is the way that we’re all raising our children on tiny islands where my partner and I have to do everything without help. The screen is what grandparents and cousins would have been a generation ago: support.

But if I slow my breathing until it’s in my gut, I know that I don’t need a decade of double-blind studies to confirm what I already know. I want my children to be able to hold a challenging conversation or read a thick novel that makes them see the contours of the world differently. I want them to be able to sit in silence, to look at the sky without the distraction of their brains begging for a screen, the low screeching of anxiety like an invisible dog fence that only they can hear. To do so many of the things I struggle to do everyday.

I’ll probably never know the right answer but before the school sends home iPads for kindergarten e-learning days, I buy a lock box for devices.

*

Barrels of rain overflow from our gutters all night, the splashes audible on the kitchen window until I go to sleep. I wake from the storm and step outside to the sixty-degree morning, the birdsong louder, as if they are celebrating their survival. The redbuds are more fuchsia, the wisps of light green covering the trees now more dense.

Along the edges of the flower beds we planted last spring–on what would have been Dad’s sixtieth birthday–buds have appeared overnight. The hostas that had been deadheaded by hungry deer last summer are resurrected as if nothing ever happened, as if forgiveness was that simple. The ferns and ajuga that we transported from Mom’s tiny yard over two-hundred miles away are back, now as their own independent plants instead of clippings. And the columbine for Dad, the one I thought for sure was dead, has returned.

*

I buy cara cara oranges most weeks. Peeling them is still tedious, requiring both of my hands and my full focus to carefully separate the fruit from its outer shell. Knives are no help; clean separation requires me to wedge the soft ends of my fingertips into the heart of the orange. The orange requires a human touch, attention that feels ancient. I sigh as juice bursts from the fruit’s ridges across my tongue.