In Defense of an Automatic “I Love You”
By Ashlee Gadd
@ashleegadd
“Since when did Everett stop saying, I love you?” my husband asks, appearing beside me at the kitchen sink where I’m scrubbing syrup off breakfast plates.
“What do you mean?” I ask, cocking my head to the side.
“When I dropped him off at school this morning, I told him I loved him as he got out of the car, and he just said, Bye.”
“Really?” I try to remember the last time I said, “I love you” to Everett, and whether or not he said it back.
“Were his friends standing there?” I ask.
My husband nods.
“Well, that’s probably why,” I say, reassuring myself as much as him. “What did you do?”
He smiles. “I just said it louder, yelled I LOVE YOU out the window over and over as I drove through the car line.”
I burst out laughing at the visual.
We hassle Ev later about the whole thing, teasing, “Are you too cool to tell your own parents you love them? What’s up with that?”
He smiles and looks sheepishly at the floor.
This becomes an inside joke in our house. We start telling Everett we love him five, ten, twenty times a day. We say it over and over, louder and louder until he says it back.
Everett, we love you. Everett, we love you.EVERETT, DID YOU HEAR US?!WE LOVE YOU, WE LOVE YOU.
Usually by the fourth or fifth time, he relents to make us stop.
“I love you, too,” he finally says, with a grin and slight eye roll.
***
Months before his tenth birthday, Everett starts begging us for a smart watch. I’m pretty sure this request has less to do with wanting a watch, and more to do with the fact that we’ve informed him he can’t bike to school until he has some kind of device where we can contact each other in case of an emergency.
“Like a phone?!” he asks incredulously.
“NO,” I practically choke on my La Croix, “Like a … watch. A watch that texts.”
I know these things exist in the world, although I haven’t done much research on what they do or how they work. In my head, Everett is six and will always be six. He’s not old enough to have a smartphone, or a smart watch, or a smart anything.
The closer we get to his birthday, though, it becomes clearer and clearer: a smart watch is what he wants. And I know, in my heart of hearts, he doesn’t just want a watch.
What he wants is independence.
***
Down the rabbit hole I go, into parenting forums and Facebook groups and podcasts, websites like Safewise.com and Internetmatters.org. I spend hours and hours poring over articles and comments and reviews about the safest smart watches for kids. I text and comment and post my own threads, asking fellow moms for their suggestions and recommendations.
After roughly seventeen hours of research, I land on what I believe is the best option for our family, and report the findings to my husband.
It’s the simplest of smart watches, which is exactly what we wanted. No games, no camera. The watch can only call or text the exact contacts we program into the corresponding app. Even better—the watch can only send preset texts that we program into the app. (Which means Everett cannot, even if he wanted to, text: poop poop poop.)
Instead, he can text the following:
Ok.
I am at school.
I am on my way home.
You picking us up?GO CHIEFS!!!! (something we added just for football season)
And of course, he can also text:
I love you.
The day we give him the watch, Everett calls me four times in two hours. Brett keeps reminding him not to waste the battery, and I have to refrain from yelling, HE CAN CALL ME EVERY FIVE MINUTES IF HE WANTS TO.
(I know he won’t always want to.)
The moment I program Everett’s number into my phone, I temporarily leave my body. It feels like I’m watching this happen to someone else. Some other mother. A mother far older than me.
***
One night at dinner during a riveting game of High/Low/Buffalo (where we swap the best, worst, and silliest parts of our day), my husband shares his high: Everett had texted, “I love you” to him that morning.
“You did?!” I say, surprised. I elbow Everett, who is sitting next to me, “You didn’t even RESPOND to my last few texts!”
I jab him in the ribs, not even trying to pretend my feelings aren’t hurt.
“Well, God must have nudged him,” Brett says, “Because I was having a really bad morning, and that text made my whole day better.”
I am undeniably jealous.
“Seriously, Ev, what’s a mom gotta do to get a text reply around here?!!” I poke him again.
“Sorry!” he says, laughing. “I just forgot.”
We finish dinner and I ask the kids if I should make cookies. A resounding yes follows. I head into the kitchen to pull dough out of the freezer. I place five little mounds on a cookie sheet, slide it into the oven, and pick up my phone from the counter, where it’s been sitting for the past hour. There’s a single text from Everett on the screen.
I love you. *butterfly emoji*
And I know he probably sent it because he felt bad. And I know he didn’t even type those words, he simply hit one button in a list of preprogrammed texts. But I smiled all the same. I’ll take an automatic “I love you” text any day.
***
How do I possibly capture the bizarre, bittersweet heartache of my children growing older without sounding like a total cliché?
I could take you down memory lane. I could paint you a picture of what this child was like when he was one, two, three. I could tell you about his combover at age two, and how today he is actually quite particular about the way his hair is styled. I could tell you how bewildering it is to stand next to this boy, with his head reaching my chin, and vividly remember the last time I wore him in an Ergo carrier—that warm summer night at the baseball game, his legs kicking in delight at all the people, all the sounds, the scent of cotton candy.
I won’t tell you how fast the last ten years have gone.
Instead, I will tell you a quick story. Earlier this year, my mother-in-law took us to Disneyland. And when it came time to ride one of the most popular roller coasters, the one that only seats two people to a car, Everett chose to ride with his high school cousin instead of his dad.
In a split second, it felt like that scene in Toy Story where Andy chooses to sleep with Buzz Lightyear in his bed instead of Woody.
Brett has always been the glitter, the fun parent, Super Dad in every way. All of our kids are obsessed with him, and I know he is nothing short of irreplaceable. But I will never forget standing in Disneyland, watching Everett and his very cool cousin wander off toward the roller roaster while Brett trailed a few feet behind. He waited at the end of the ride, watching from the ground as a witness, not a participant.
And I could almost cry, even now, thinking about the significance of that one specific moment. This is part of the ache of parenthood, the steady detaching, like slowly peeling a window cling off glass. Friends and peers and high school cousins are becoming flashier and more appealing. We’ve always known this shift was coming, of course. We were kids once, too.
We’ve just never done the steady detaching from this side.
We are officially entering the next phase. We’re watching our ten-year-old son stretch his wings, desperate to fly. We are slowly opening our hands, releasing him into the world, praying he always knows how to find his way back home.
***
It’s an ordinary morning, everyone rushing around getting ready for school. The scent of waffles travels through the house, while the kids take turns banging on the piano, rotating between the Star Wars theme song and Baby Shark.
I’m in the shower when Brett takes the boys to school. When I get out, I pick up my phone, and there’s a single text from Ev. Unprompted. Not guilt-induced. I haven’t said a word about the watch in days.
The text reads:
BYE!!!!!
I love you. *butterfly emoji*
And I know he didn’t say those words. He didn’t even type them out specifically. All he did was push a button on his watch. But I also know he means it.
I smile and type out my text back:
I love you more. *sunglasses guy emoji*
P.S. If you loved this essay, you'll love our podcast, Motherhood + Technology.
Words and photos by Ashlee Gadd. Ashlee is a wife, mother of three, believer, and the founder of Coffee + Crumbs. When she's not working or vacuuming Cheerios out of the carpet, she loves making friends on the Internet, eating cereal for dinner, and rearranging bookshelves. She’s desperately trying to make blogging cool again. Sign up for her newsletter here.