Mothering on the Telephone . . . It’s the Busiest Signal of Them All
“It’s one of your kids again,” my co-worker said, handing me the telephone.
“Joe is bothering me,” Peter, then 8, blubbered at the other end of the line. “Tell him to leave me alone.”
“OK,” I said wearily. “Put him on, and I’ll see if I can straighten this out.”
“I can’t,” Peter explained. “I locked him out of the house.”
Ever so faintly, over the line, I could hear Joe, then 12, banging on the back door and screaming that he would not stop until he had settled the score with his brother.
Once again, I found myself practicing the art that Doctors Spock and Brazelton never tell you about: mothering by phone. Since I first started calling Joe from the office when he was just a toddler, I have had almost daily practice. I have diagnosed fevers, soothed scraped knees, settled squabbles and, more recently, explained what little I could remember about polynomial equations--all over the phone.
All the personnel manuals, of course, say that the ideal employee should avoid letting personal and family matters interfere with business. Life should be neatly compartmentalized, so that what is going on at home never impinges on company routine. A worker should keep his mind on his work.
There may be some paragons out there who actually live by these rules--but they’re not mothers.
Working mothers nearly always know what is going on at home, no matter how busy they are. Whether they spend their days word processing or working on assembly lines or drafting multimillion-dollar legal contracts, mothers are linked, as fathers rarely are, to what their children are doing at home or at the baby sitter’s.
And the link, more often than not, is the telephone.
Ear to Ear
Mothering by phone usually starts with those nervous calls to the baby sitter right after the new mother returns to work, to check on whether the baby is napping and eating on schedule.
By the child’s first birthday, the phone will be held up to his ear so that Mommy can speak directly to him and perhaps, O bliss!, elicit some response. By 3, he can report fully on his day at nursery school. By 5, the child of average precocity is direct-dialing Mom.
So accustomed is Erica Johnson, 1, to talking to her mother, Susan, on the phone that when someone asks, “Where’s Mommy?” Erica holds her hand up to her ear as if she were cradling a receiver. Her brother, 6, is more practiced and a bit more formal; when he dials Susan’s office, he announces, “This is Lionel, your son.”
School-aged children often get into the habit of calling as soon as they reach home, whether there’s a baby sitter there or not. “My daughter calls just about every day because she wants to check in, to be reassured that I’m here,” one Arcadia mother said of a 6-year-old. “She asks me whether she should change to cooler clothes, what she should have for a snack.
“If I’m out of the office in the afternoon, I’ll come back and find a stack of messages. ‘Mommy, call Tara.’ ‘Mommy, I called 15 minutes ago.’ Then, ‘Mommy, it’s an emergency. Call home.’ Once I got a message that said, ‘Call Tara in 15 minutes.’ It turned out she figured she would be away from the phone doing something else that long.”
Savvy kids quickly figure out that if they’ve broken a household rule or misbehaved, it’s better to report the transgression on the phone rather than wait for Mother to come home. “My kids know that if they tell me they’ve broken my favorite vase when I’m in the office, I can’t yell at them without calling attention to myself,” a Westside lawyer said. “And by the time I get home, I’ve cooled off.”
Many mothers find, however, that, in a crisis, they can even discipline children on the phone. When her son balks at taking his bath, one mother has been known to hiss into the phone, “Take a bath now or there’ll be no ‘Square One’ for a week,” thus threatening to deprive him of his favorite television program. It is the only punishment, she said, that is “so specific and . . . so horrible that you can deliver it over the phone.”
The phone can be used to deliver motherly comfort, too. Scraped elbows, cuts and bloody noses are often reported to mothers, even when there is a perfectly competent housekeeper or neighbor on the spot to minister to the injured. “It’s not that the baby sitter doesn’t do the right thing,” Tara’s mother said. “But Tara wants me when she gets hurt.”
Some children can be eerily calm when reporting the worst calamities. Tricia Vick, a Pasadena lawyer, recalls the day her younger son, Kevin, 13, called to report a skateboard accident. “Do you need to see a doctor?” she asked frantically. Matter-of-fact Kevin said simply: “I think I may need stitches. I can see a flap of skin hanging out from my arm.”
Too Busy to Talk
Sometimes, of course, mothers have to say they’re too busy to talk. “ ‘We’ll talk about it when I get home’ is my standard line,” said Karen Gruettner, a dental hygienist and mother of three. “They’ve learned not to bother me unless it’s urgent, because I work with patients and can’t be going to the phone all the time.”
When her two teen-age sons, Keith and Kirk, call in the midst of a heated argument at home, “I have been known to hang up on them,” said Shari Thorell, vice president of alumni relations at USC. “Normally, when my private line rings at 3:27 p.m., I know they’re calling to touch base and let me know they’re fine. It’s a real upper for me. . . . But if they’re squabbling and won’t listen to reason, I don’t put up with it.”
Over the years, I have heard via phone of both triumphs and disasters. Peter called when he stunned himself by winning the Plaza Pasadena spelling bee, Joe when he was chosen to play Riff, the gang leader, in the junior high production of “West Side Story.”
Unfortunately, they also have called to report that their sister, Kate, 2, has scribbled all over the kitchen wall and that Comet is taking off the paint as well as the crayon marks. Kate, uncharacteristically reticent, refused to come to the phone.
Sometimes, I am informed in time to head off such fiascos. Joe, now 14, thoughtfully consulted me before he began to brew chemicals for a science project in my brand-new Calphalon sauce pan, so I could suggest substituting a coffee can.
A Call to the Paramedics
And, once, I got the call that all working mothers dread. Our housekeeper, Ahlin, telephoned to say that Peter, then 4, had climbed to the top shelf of the linen closet, found an old bottle of cough medicine we somehow had overlooked and drunk at least half of it. “Now he’s asleep and I can’t wake him up,” she cried. “I’m scared.”
That was one problem that couldn’t be solved over the phone. A co-worker, another working mother, called the paramedics, and I sped home, arriving just as the ambulance did. Ipecac was administered and Peter spent half the night in the emergency room.
As gender roles have changed, I’ve noticed that more and more fathers are being called by their offspring. My husband has begun to get his share, particularly when the kids doubt my ability to help with their math homework. And once, when I worked in The Times’ Washington bureau, I answered the phone on deadline and heard a little voice say, “I want to speak to Daddy.”
“Who is your daddy?” I asked stupidly.
“He’s Daddy, Daddy, Daddy !” the voice said, breaking into tears.
After a sudden brainstorm, I said, “What’s your name?”
“Jenny,” came the answer.
Bob Toth, then The Times’ White House correspondent, quickly identified himself as Jenny’s daddy and, I noted with some pleasure, sat down to do a little mothering over the phone.
A Natural Thing
Those people who believe that mothers belong at home with their children may find it shameful or sad that many of us do part of our mothering over the phone. But, to me, it seems like the most natural thing in the world, maybe because I’m the daughter of a working mother.
From the time my brother and I could use the phone, my mother insisted that we memorize her number at work. We didn’t call every day, for my mother worked in aerospace plants with time clocks and strict regulations about taking time off for personal matters. But, in an emergency, we always knew how to reach her reassuring voice.
Today, although I am middle-aged and my mother is old enough that she would not want me to mention her age in print, I still carry, deep inside my wallet, a scrap of paper with a phone number written on it, just in case I have to call Mom at work.
DR, GEORGE CAREY / Los Angeles Times