Call Me

I did something I swore I would never do. Emma turns 9 in a couple of weeks, and I bought her a cell phone for her birthday. I know, I know. I can’t believe it either.

If you had asked me that question a year or two ago, I would have told you that she wasn’t getting one until she was in 7^th grade and that is that. And I was thinking that 7^th grade would be a generous concession. But the truth is I caved. I waffled, I conceded, I gave in to the paranoia only a mother feels when she is out of the immediate control of her child, and am buying her a phone at age NINE, an absolutely unheard of age for a girl to be getting her own phone.

Let me first qualify my decision a little bit. I’m not buying her iPhone 27 for heaven’s sake. She’s getting a Tracfone, prepaid with no contract. I’m going to monitor her usage with the same ferocious attention that I do what she wears, eats, watches and reads. (Good Lord, I sound like a Tiger Mother…)

Here’s the situation, friends. We live on a farm (you know this already) in the middle of nowhere (you know this as well) and drive in to Fairmont each day. Emma is at an age where she is involved in after-school activities, and also is expected to get herself (and her little sister) to daycare on the bus without any help whatsoever. She is also required to know which days she rides with Carys, which days she puts Carys on by herself, which days I’m picking her up, which days her dad is picking her up, where she is getting picked up, when she’s getting picked up and so on and so forth. (I got tired just typing that.)

We do our level best to keep everything on track, but life happens, you know? Sometimes something comes up at school and I can’t leave right away. Sometimes someone gets sick and Aaron and I have to shuffle who gets who and when. Sometimes somebody just forgets what day it is and where all the kids are. (This is when you are REALLY glad you got a spot in Julie’s daycare. She is on top of things and will call me immediately if some kid somewhere does or doesn’t do something out of the ordinary.)Have I told you yet how much I love her?

Anyway, in the last month, 2 different situations came up that caused a panic. First, Emma was invited to be a skills tutor in an after-school group for math. We then had to coordinate her pick-up time with my basketball practice schedule and Aaron’s work schedule. We were doing just fine until I went to an after-school meeting that ran long. All of a sudden I looked at the clock and realized I was already 15 minutes late to pick her up.

I can’t describe my panic to you; I ran to the phone and tried to get the teacher who was supervising on the phone – no answer. I then called one of my friends in the elementary building who happened to still be there who went wandering around the school looking for Emma while I drove like a bat out of you know where to get there myself. Turns out Emma was pretty cool headed; she went down to the CER office and asked them if she could wait for me in their office. (I teach a lot of Community Ed classes through them, and Emma is used to being there with me.) My friend in the office, Kris, promptly took her down to one of their after-school programs where she was busy doing arts and crafts and eating a sandwich when I finally dashed in, heart racing and breathless.

This is a great example of what kind of an environment I teach in. These people will do anything at all for anyone, any time, anywhere. It made me feel so good to know that my child wasn’t standing outside on a sidewalk wondering if her mother was ever going to show up. I still felt horribly, terribly guilty, and it took me a full hour to calm my heart rate the heck down.

We used to live in a world where kids could find a phone on a street corner; where kids could play on random playgrounds for hours waiting for a ride home. Remember when you could just let your kids walk home or to a friend’s house or to the neighbor’s? Maybe the town kids still do that; I suppose living on a farm gives me a distinct disadvantage in this arena. My kids don’t know their way around town because they’ve never walked anywhere or biked anywhere; I just drop them off and pick them up.

And I know we are in what would probably be considered a small town, and it is nice to believe that Fairmont is immune from the dangers of the big city. But too many days I read newspaper reports of children taken from their playgrounds, their bikes, their own yards, and I’m just not willing to risk it for the sake of convenience.

(Yes, I’m being dramatic. I know. I can’t help it.)

To make a long story shorter, a similar event happened just a few days later when Emma thought she had Choir practice after school. She didn’t get on the bus, and  by the time she realized she didn’t have practice that day, the bus had already left. She went down to the gym where she knew I sometimes have basketball practice and waited (hoped!) for me to show up. By the time I got there she had herself pretty worked up worrying about whether I was really coming and whether I would be mad that she had not gone to daycare on the bus.

So I bought her a phone.

It really does give me peace of mind to know that wherever she is, I’m just a phone call or a text message away. And honestly, if you had looked into those golden-brown eyes bright with unshed tears and seen the waver of her lower lip when she came running over to me, you would have caved in too.

Here’s the fun part of the story.

Her birthday is still 2 weeks away, but once I got the phone loaded with contacts and minutes we decided sooner was better than later. So we took the family out to eat at the Chinese restaurant in the mall last night. (I feel very lucky that my kids love Chinese food…yum.) We finished eating and the kids went over to feed the fish in the koi pond. I slipped the new phone into Emma’s coat pocket and then announced we were going to walk around the mall for a little while and do some shopping.

As we wandered through the mall, Aaron sent a text message to her phone that read “Happy Birthday!” She didn’t hear the beep of the text alert. So as we walked, Aaron repeatedly called the phone. Finally, she notices the music and says, “Mom, what is that sound?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It sounds like it’s coming from you.”

She held the coat up to her ear and went digging through the pockets. When she pulled it out, she exclaimed, “Mom! I think I got someone else’s coat accidentally! There’s a phone in my pocket!”

She was looking back and forth at us, and we were both kind of grinning and waiting.

“It says there’s a message! Should I open it?  It says, ‘Happy Birthday!’ Whose phone is this?”

When she got no response from either of us except stupid grins she finally says, “Is it MINE?”

And then the floodgates opened. She was so happy she was fighting off tears and Aaron was laughing and Carys and Cooper were actually speechless for once.

That made for a pretty awesome Wednesday night.

Of course we followed up the evening with explaining what a Tracfone is, how it works, and what the rules were going to be for having one. Maybe I’m just trying to justify this to myself, but can you really put a dollar amount on peace of mind? Or your child’s safety? (And hey, maybe I can swap some chore time for phone minutes – that might be a good idea…)

Despite all my resolve and earlier reservations, I think I can call this a win.