Phoning it in

On outsourcing my son's bedtime stories to A.I. (and trying so hard to be a "good mom," I ended up feeling like a bad one)

This photo was A.I.-generated, but I didn’t have to tell you that.

The cloud stories began as a brief guided meditation.

“Isn’t this bed so soft?” I asked my wide-awake son one night at bedtime with a theatric fake yawn. “Like a cloud?”

“Let’s close our eyes and pretend we’re on a cloud for a minute,” I continued. He could probably smell my desperation. “We’re floating over the city of Atlanta, looking down at all the skyscrapers. Keep your eyes closed and tell me what you see…”

Something I’ve encountered in both my work and parenting lives is the inevitability of scope creep. What starts as a short news story bloats into a 2,000 word feature. A few deliverables balloons into a campaign. And a cute thing you do with your child one time grows into a ritual, which calcifies into a mandatory routine. Before long, we were no longer simply floating over the Atlanta cityscape astride our cloud, but boarding it to embark on protracted, convoluted adventures: to Skateboard Island, to Mount Waffle Cone, to outer space. And Cloud Story, as it became known in our house, became a non-negotiable part of the nightly order of operations.

I have my own endless wells of self-doubt, but aspirational tropes of motherhood aren’t typically fodder for them. Where I once might’ve felt a pang of inferiority seeing Christy Dawn-clad moms frolicking with their children through a sun-dappled meadow, or moms tackling kindergarten readiness checklists with the alacrity of a McKinsey consultant, I’ve since gotten pretty good at seeing that stuff and thinking, “hard pass.” I don’t do sensory bins. I’m not very good at playing with trains or fixing broken Lego creations. I feel the same amount of moral neutrality toward this fact as I do toward not being good at math or remembering trig.

Storytime, though? Surely this was one area in which I, as a writer, could — nay, must — excel.

I’ve been a professional writer for over a decade, and a full-time freelancer for most of that time. In my journalism work, I am paid per story, which means my income and ability to generate ideas are inextricably linked: no ideas = no published work = no money. Writer’s block is a luxury, and unfortunately neither our utility providers, preschool, nor credit card companies will accept it as a valid reason for not paying bills on time. Though diversifying into other kinds of writing and editing over the years has relieved some of that pressure, my line of work still requires me to come up with, and execute, good ideas, whether I have them handy or not.

So I imagined that inventing a quick, ad-lib bedtime story for my son would be no big deal for me. Would, in fact, be my time to shine as a mother: a bridge for connecting with my child through my art. An opportunity to share an important part of myself with the most important part of myself. My sun-soaked Christy Dawn meadow moment.

It did not take long for the Cloud Story, as it became known in our household, to become ungainly, adding another twenty minutes between us and the bedtime finish line. There was a template that had to be followed: a quest of some sort (ideally to a magical place), a problem only my child could solve, a reward at the end. Meanwhile, my imagination began to dwindle while my antipathy began to grow. Cloud Story was the very last step before getting to clock out of parenting for the day, and that step was only becoming more burdensome. Being creative, extemporaneously? At the end of the day, after preschool pickup and making dinner and doing dishes and brushing teeth, every single night? In this economy?

Most evenings, by the time I finally make it into my own bed, I can’t read more than one page of a book before falling asleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night with my brain fizzing over work and kindergarten and the ghoulish news. Motherhood has taken a hedge-trimmer to my cognitive functions that don’t directly contribute to keeping small people alive.¹ There was simply no room for quests to Mount Waffle Cone in there.

Then one night, after putting our younger daughter to bed and bolstering myself for another Cloud Story on the walk down the hall to my son’s room, I reached a shameful rock-bottom. “Hang on, bud,” I called out to him as he waited for me in his bed. “I’m just going to run to the bathroom first.” I went inside the bathroom, pulled out my phone, and cued up ChatGPT.

I know people who have folded AI into the mechanics of their day-to-day life. I very much do not want to be one of them. I’ve used it, sure: I’ve asked it to help me (and my motherhood-stunted neurons) reformat my resume, suggest some headline ideas, and fine-tune a professional email, and the results were… fine? (Once, I asked it to suggest some relevant peer-reviewed studies on a topic I was researching, and half of its suggestions turned out to be completely fictional. I pointed that out, and it apologized, then provided a few more fake studies.) I can’t really use it without the nagging awareness that I’m swapping convenience for tech that will eventually make much of my job obsolete and suck the planet dry while doing so. But in the thick of parenting, convenience can be a siren song.

That night, trudging toward my umpteenth Cloud Story and ransacking my brain for absolutely any scrap of inspiration I could find, I was utterly tapped out. I could feel a begrudging shadow-self creeping in, a version of mothering with which I’m intimately familiar: the one that grits her teeth and goes through the motions with an eye cast toward the clock, as though parenthood is something one must simply endure, as though one can only re-inhabit herself once the children are asleep.

After prompting the app with my parameters, it generated a handful of story ideas with short summaries of each. I scanned the list — Festival of the Fireflies, Dinosaur Safari, Floating Library in the Sky — and felt a burden lift, nay, sail from my shoulders.

Have you ever asked a robot to replace a very personal aspect of your parenting for you? As pleased as I was to give my brain a hall pass, telling my son a bedtime story composed by a computer program taught by massive datasets to mimic a loving and creative parent wasn’t a secret backdoor to bonding with my kid. (Not to mention, it was embarrassing. I had one job, etc.) Festival of the Foreflies was a fun prompt, but the act of retelling it felt like a Xerox of an act of love.

Storytelling is something I’ve built my whole life around, and in these moments, it was also a path to meaningful connection with my own kid. How did I arrive at outsourcing it to a non-human entity? It’s a Simone Biles-worthy series of painful cognitive backbends: believing I had a duty to provide this specific and special thing for my kid in order to be a good parent, not particularly enjoying it, outsourcing it to a robot instead of simply not doing it, and as a result, feeling much more like a wire armature of a mother than I’d have felt if I’d just never told a single Cloud Story to begin with, or said no somewhere along the way.

Recently and without even realizing it at the time, I told my son what I believe was our last Cloud Story together. After about 7 months of this routine, approximately 230+ tellings (or retellings), and several failed attempts at redirecting, I offered him an alternative to which he finally agreed: want to borrow my reading light, and we can read one more book together in the dark? I haven’t told a Cloud Story since.

These are the rites that modern parenting culture instructs us not just to treasure, but mourn. We’re told to approach these moments with anticipatory grief: you never know when you’ll pick up your child/rock them to sleep/tell them a bedtime story for the last time, so enjoy it while it lasts. It’s a depressing framework that puts their childhood on a doomsday clock, as though your kid stops being yours at midnight on their 5th birthday, or the first day they walk into middle school, or leaves home for college, as though all the care and love and work that got them there, should we be so lucky to witness it, isn’t the whole entire point. Maybe when my kid’s a teenage boy flipping me the bird, I’ll feel differently, but for right now, it bums me out supremely. Hard pass.

The Western brand of parenting is both incredibly isolating and demanding. It asks us, particularly mothers, to constantly set ourselves aside, to reorganize not just our lives but also our desires: to spend a Saturday morning at the horrible smelly trampoline park and like it, to step back into one’s full personhood only after bedtime has concluded. But some of the most rewarding times of parenting are those fleeting moments when my kids and I can inhabit our full selves together in tandem. Sometimes our interests run comfortably parallel, like when my son is driving his remote control bulldozer through the compost while I garden. Sometimes they overlap, and our curiosities — our desires — align, pulling us toward one another. These are my favorite parts.

Curled up with my son in his lofted bed, reading about bioluminescent animals or moon rovers in the glow of my clip-on reading light, there has been no dread, no sense of rushing through the routine, no struggling to plumb the depths of my desiccated prefrontal cortex and coming up dry, and no machine learning. Instead, we just read together. We talk about how piddock clams drill into rocks and laugh at the illustration of the Soviet lunar rover, whose bathtub shape always makes my son giggle. No artifice or shadow-selves present; each of us, very much so.

1. No, really. Read

Chelsea Conaboy

’s excellent book, “Mother Brain,” for more about how caregiving results in neural pruning.