Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-03-18 - 7:09 a.m.

Decisions

I'm back to an occupation that seems to take up a lot of my time recently: I'm Considering a Cell Phone.

Woh. That's even scary to write down.

But writing it down is probably good, because writing (for me) can be a way of organizing and clarifying my thinking, of coming to some sort of conclusion.

Of course, writing can also be a way of discovering charming metaphors I'd never noticed before, and following them so far off into the tall grass that I can no longer remember my original premise. In fact, one time when I was writing, I...

Okay. No. I am disciplined, I am In Control. I am going to take this figurative piece of yellow legal paper (is white paper illegal?) and make a line down the middle WITH A RULER and write "Does Kath Need A Cell Phone?" at the top and head my columns, "Yes" and "No" and make some sense out of the issue, so that I can quit surfing the web for cheap cell calling plans and bookmarking them and then wondering why on earth I did that.

Yes. Kathleen needs a cell phone. My ex husband has been guilting me into getting one, implying that only a bad mother would be inaccessible at every second to her children. In truth, Older Daughter does need to pass on occasional minor bits of information, like she's nowhere near where I am supposed to pick her up in ten minutes, and she has to call from pay phones that don't accept return calls. Plus, while we have developed a pager code for the places she is most LIKELY to be and she can send the place code and the time she wants to be picked up to my pager, she has no way of coding, "I got on the number eleven bus instead of the fourteen because I asked a schoolmate instead of following the directions you gave me and now I am downtown at the public library, what should I do?"

Yes, I need a cell phone. I need a cell phone for times like last week where I was sitting in a restaurant booth with two children and an Alzheimer's-afflicted parent and I needed to make a phone call and the only phone booth was outside the restaurant so I couldn't send the kids to make the call and I could not leave my father or my children alone or in care of each other and I didn't see a waiter I liked enough to ask, "Hey, could you sit with my family for a moment and make sure no one of the three of them tries to cram an entire hamburger in at one time, and never mind what the big guy says, I'm not from the FBI and he's not a hostage."

But then, by the end of the evening I don't know which I wanted more - a cell phone or a discreet portable ladies' urinal.

And no, I do not need a cell phone. People have been raising kids since time immemorial without them. It is not necessary to be attached to your children by some satellite umbilical. Children need to learn to operate independently. And if I am not Right There, Right Freakin' Immediately THERE, in an emergency for my kids or my dad or my mother or my neighbor, well, then, it will work out some other way. I am not so all-important that I cannot be out of touch for one second.

Besides, if I had a cell phone I would have to figure out a way to WEAR the thing, because my briefcase goes in to work with me but not my purse, and my purse goes into the store but not my briefcase, and quite often neither one makes it into the house with me for the evening. So I'd be one of those people with a cell phone clipped to her waistband, which might tempt me to use the thing in the grocery store, and then I'd have to feel about ME the way I feel about people who ignore the people around them in order to connect to someone they'd RATHER wait in line with.

And cell phones must be recharged, and we KNOW how good I would be at that, resulting in a useless phone that would probably still be sitting on the bathroom counter under a wet towel anyway.

And most importantly, I can't afford a cell phone. Isn't there something ridiculous about a woman who borrows money from her mother and can't pay the BASIC phone bill signing on for a cell phone?

Yes, I do. No, I don't. Like most important purchases, I will worry this bone for a long time, pro and con, should and shouldn't, will and won't. Then some afternoon I will get a totally wild hair up my phone line and go out and get one immediately at the nearest available phone-getting place, just to end the torture of indecision. I may not have an answer, but at least I know my own processes.

�

previous - next

�