Last night, my mother came to help me release the ladybugs. We had been exchanging abstract messages for a while about parallel botanical issues. I’ve noticed small clumps of what looks like fluff or bath foam gathering at the base of the leaves of some of my favorite plants. This is more than just a plant, let me explain, this is a fairytale, a fable plant. Its leaves are large and unfurling, and after teasing for a while with finger-long pink buds, they bloom at dusk, each bud opening like a giant water lily, with a deep, sweet scent like expensive vanilla. emits. In the morning, the flowers wither and become rubbery and obscene, hanging from the stems. My mother said the problem was mealybugs attacking my plants. And there was only one real way to get rid of them.
The mealybugs came just as I was trying to turn back time. I never wanted to do that until now. Don’t roll your eyes, yes I dress old-fashioned, but just because I’m walking around in a 70’s dress doesn’t mean I want to go back to slutty life or blackouts. No, my focus today is on gently distancing myself from technology for just a little while. As you know, my daughter has just started sixth grade, her final year of elementary school, and last week she was shaking with some sort of agony when she realized that “everyone else” had a cell phone. I went home. I wasn’t ready for this conversation. I knew this was the bridge we were going to cross when she moved on to middle school (bleeding and saying, “Save yourself!”). But I tried well.
My daughter, who was in her last year of elementary school, came home distressed that “everyone else” had a cell phone.
I believe that many of the problems that arise from young people having mobile phones, such as bullying, poor mental health, and everyday surveillance, are rooted in real life, and that focusing solely on banning mobile phones is not a good idea. Instead, I believe that real life should be taken seriously. , or pressure parents to fight at home. We need to fix its structures (including broken mental health services), politics (including tech companies’ financial incentives to keep kids on social media), and our own unhealthy relationship with our phones. Until then, I think the problem is likely to mutate rather than go away. The problem isn’t just the phone, it’s the world that the phone reflects. But until that world changes, my personal preference is to keep my kids off their phones for as long as possible.
I came to this decision a while ago when I saw a little girl on public transport absentmindedly scrolling through a long WhatsApp thread, and I felt like I was falling off a cliff, stone by stone. That’s when I felt a sense of time. I asked the school for some guidance. We had a nice chat, which was interrupted by the teacher’s jeering laughter when I gently remarked that I wished I had kept in touch with my classmates’ parents over the summer. The teacher said, “That will never work.” Because every family is different and it’s too hard not to give in to that.
Of course I didn’t say anything to my daughter. Instead, I told her the headlines (excluding the recent article about how only 3% of 12-year-olds in the UK don’t own a smartphone), talked about peer pressure, and talked about some more expensive issues. I talked about the future.
So the ladybug, an ancient solution to a primitive problem, came along at the perfect time. We shopped around and ended up buying pupa sachets and live bug sachets online. They weren’t cheap by any means, so I regretted for a while that I didn’t collect a handful even though I had the chance. Earlier this year, while in Somerset with my family, we came across the “loveliness” of a ladybug wriggling on a windowpane. At the time, I wrote about how I questioned collective nouns because they sounded as if they were calling themselves, and also about my visceral fear of too many adorable things . We both held back screams as my mother cut open the first bag of live bugs. La Grande Boeuf, you poor souls, trafficked to the suburbs in metal bags, bought just to eat, and die.
They were babies and looked like microscopic alligators. One was itching on my hand, and the other was running around on my mother’s sleeve. We tried not to scream over the leaves in the direction of the cottonwood-like insects. Then we opened the bag with the larvae, and the eggs were probably hidden in a handful of sawdust and nestled together. Then I hung it above the plant. We were both mildly hysterical and a little furious. I guess I was expecting some drama, with the ladybug zooming towards the mealybug like a released pigeon. Instead, and I think it’s probably correct, in the old act, it happened slowly and in a whimpering manner.
This morning, feeling guilty and anxious, I went to check on them, but I couldn’t see a single one, and the mealybugs were still bubbling as before. How long does it take to rewind and do everything right? I felt like the old woman who swallowed a spider to catch the fly she digested in the previous verse. She swallowed spiders to catch flies and eat mealybugs, making it seem like things were so simple. That’s why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she will die?
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on @EvaWiseman
