“No, ma. You did it wrong again!” I said in exasperation. “You didn’t go into the inbox.”

“But I did it exactly as you told me,” she protested. Deep down however she knew she’d skipped a step somewhere.

“No.” I said, my voice increasing in volume. I controlled my temper before continuing. “You’re just trying to remember the sequence of steps without reasoning things through. You have to look at the screen while pressing the icons.” I took the mobile from her hand. “Here-” I started tapping on the screen. “See? First you have to go to the main menu, then choose the message option-”

“The message option is the envelope, right?” she asked me again.

I puffed my cheeks out. “Yes, ma. The envelope.” I kept going through the sequence. “Then you go into the new message screen...”

While I repeated the steps for the umpteenth time, my mother was looking intently at what I was doing. What frustrated me most was that she had followed intently every time I had shown her how to read and send an SMS from her mobile, but every time she managed to somehow get it wrong.

I was regretting the day I decided to buy her a smart phone. She had complained at the beginning, saying that she had done without a mobile phone for sixty years; why would she need one now? “It’s easy ma, you’ll see. Once you get used to it you won’t go anywhere without it.”

I was full of optimism back then. After all, six year olds know how to use smart phones, why shouldn’t a sixty-five year old manage? It had taken me the best part of a week to get her using the mobile as a regular phone and another fortnight to learn how to top up her account, by the end of which I started having second thoughts.

Then one of her friends told her that by sending an SMS she could communicate at a cheaper rate, and the real trouble began. The time spent teaching her up to then was a drop in the ocean compared to what was in store. Four weeks after she had asked me that dreaded question; “How can I send a message from my phone?” we were still nowhere near to getting her to send her first one. In the same period of time the Apollo 11 team members had made greater inroads in sending a man on the moon.

“There.” I said as I sent a message from her mobile to mine, “I should be receiving the message on my phone now.”

On cue my mobile bleeped to life. I picked the mobile from the table and showed it to her. “see that little smiley face at the corner? It means that I got a message. Now all I have to do is go into my inbox and read it.” I read it out loud. “Hello, this is your mum. I finally learned how to send an SMS.” The irony was lost on my mother however. “OK” she said as I handed her back her mobile. “I think I have it this time.”

Yeah, right. I told myself as she started tapping on her screen. Hardly any time had passed before she stopped, baffled by the unfamiliar screen in front of her. I rolled my eyes, on the brink of losing my temper at another failure. “Good grief, ma! It couldn’t be easier.” I blurted out.

“It’s easy for you perhaps,” she countered. Then she continued, her voice breaking, “but it isn’t for me. All these screens, I just can’t understand.”

I just can’t understand. The phrase rang through my head. It wasn’t my mother’s voice however; it was my own voice in the piping tones of when I was barely eight. In my mind’s eye I was transported back by over thirty years to a scene where it was me who was sitting at the table instead of my mother, the mobile morphed into a copybook and pencil, with my mother leaning over me.

“I just can’t understand.” I heard myself wail once again. On the copybook in front of me were a series of words which I had scribbled. Most of them had been written incorrectly.

“You’re not trying hard enough,” my mother said; not in the frail voice she has today, but in a tone that commanded authority. She wrote the words I had spelt incorrectly. “Now copy them for the whole length of the page.”

“But that will take ages!” I protested. She was in no mood to grant quarter. “The more you repeat a word the more it will stick in your head,” she said as she ruffled my hair. “And the more you write something the more you will remember it. Repetition, that’s the trick.” My spelling skills were atrocious as a little boy, and my mother had taken it on herself to right that wrong. Every day I would be seated at the table, pencil in hand while my mother dictated ten words of her choice. All the words I got wrong I would have to write down for a whole copybook page. This had gone on for months until I consistently started writing all ten words correctly-

The memory lasted only a few heartbeats, but it was more than enough. But it was more than enough. My frustration quickly faded away, it was replaced instead by a burning shame. Did my mother look at me then in the same way I had done a few moments ago? I doubt it. Did she ever feel like giving up on me? Never. She never gave up on me. She stuck in there through tens of incorrectly spelt words at a time, tantrums thrown, pages torn and hurtful words uttered. Never once did she ask for, nor receive, a thank you.

Back in the real world my mother had just managed to get back into the main menu on her mobile. I put a hand on her shoulder, chastened by the experience I had just gone through. “You’re right,” I said. “Just because it’s easy for me I shouldn’t expect it to be easy for you. Don’t be confused by all those screens, the more you acquaint yourself with them the easier it will become. You’ll see.” Then in words which were all too familiar, I added “Repetition, that’s the trick.”

A couple of months later I was returning home from work when my mobile bleeps. I opened the message. Hello dear. How was work today?

I texted back. Busy as usual. Just got home.

While I was getting out of my work clothes the mobile bleeped again. Say hello to Corinne for me. God bless.

I smiled to see how prolific she had become with text messages. Will do. I was about to send the reply, when added two more words; Thank you.