How My Teen Is Never Too Busy To Call Me…Old
I thought I was going for lunch.
With my daughter.
Turns out I was headed for a reality check.
From my daughter.
“Why don’t you call ahead and make sure they are open?” I suggested playing the role of the boring, plan-ahead mother.
I play it well.
Seconds later a concerned look spread across Daughter’s face.
The wrinkled nose.
Similar to when I ask her to clean her room.
Just enough so that I can see a surface.
Of something.
Of anything.
“Their phone is broken,” she reported.
“What do you mean, ‘broken?’” I asked.
“Their phone is making this weird noise,” she explained. “It’s broken.”
She handed the phone over to me.
A smile spread across my face as I heard a very familiar, regular beeping sound.
Well, familiar to me.
“That’s not broken,” I informed her. “That’s a busy signal.”
“A what?” Daughter looked like I was speaking a different language.
A language called, “Ancient Technology History.”
“A busy signal,” I explained. “It means someone else is already talking on the line.”
“Yeah, okay,” she dismissed me. “Well, we don’t have that.
I instantly understood what she meant.
Not “We” as in she and I.
There is no ME in her We.
Her We is now.
Now doesn’t have a busy signal.
Now has call waiting.
In a pinch, voicemail.
Her We has access.
When she wants.
With whom she wants.
She expects to be able to email or text a teacher to ask about a homework assignment.
After school.
At night.
Can you imagine, Dear Reader?
Would you have ever called a teacher at home?
Who knew they were real people who had homes?
Daughter’s We dismissed me to a land faraway.
A land before call waiting.
Before voicemail.
Before answering machines.
A land with push buttons that squished into phone and moved instead of appearing as an image on flat glass screen.
Shoot, I’ll go way back to dial phones.
Our home phone number had two zeroes in it.
Took forever to dial that sucker.
My mother would use the eraser end of a pencil so that she didn’t break a nail.
“It would appear We do have a busy signal because you just got one,” I said to Daughter, trying to meld our realities.
She shrugged.
With zero interest.
Just like talking on the phone at all.
I call her.
She doesn’t answer.
I text her.
I get an immediate response.
It’s one of the great modern mysteries of raising a teen.
I want to ask her, “Do We have two different phones?”
I can get frustrated or I can smile.
I choose smile.
I just think of the day that will come.
And it will come.
When Daughter will be out to lunch with her own daughter.
The conversation will surely go, “Phone? What’s that? Yeah, We don’t have that.”
Daughter will instantly feel ancient.
I will be happy to comfort her.
All she has to do is call.
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