The wireless umbilical cord to Mom

My 12-year-old daughter can now phone home. Or bug me during a work meeting.

“Mom, when will u b home?” a recent text from her cell phone asked. “I want to go to a friend’s house.”

I read it with a sigh of relief and a tinge of concern. A cell phone. It’s the latest pre-teen rite of passage, signaling me that someone’s teen years are sneaking up on us.

Getting our eldest child a cell phone didn’t come easy (or cheap for that matter). It was nine long months of debating, cajoling, crying, yelling (on both her part and mine) and finally careful consideration of our options. My husband and I had decided a cell phone could wait until age thirteen. That was our answer when she asked a few months after her eleventh birthday. It didn’t stop her cell-phone campaign.

Emma wants to be a doctor, but surely has a future as a high-powered attorney or lobbyist on Capitol Hill. Doctors give it to you straight; she played dirty.

She started with an assignment on persuasive writing for her English class. The title: “Why having a cell phone is a good idea for middle-schoolers.” It quoted such scholarly sources as Wikipedia and her friend Savanna, who got her first cell phone in second grade and has found it useful on several occasions. At least that’s what Emma’s paper said. She earned an A on the paper with a note from her teacher: “Good luck asking your parents!”

She didn’t have much luck. In fact, her tactics annoyed her father. (Really? She needed to air this subject through a homework assignment?) I, however, found her approach novel. It beat her brother’s door-slamming, feet-stomping, eye-rolling antics any day of the week.

Next, she tried calling me from school to tell me track practice was cancelled.

“I could have just texted you from my locker. But I don’t have a cell phone, so I had to leave my math class in the middle of a quiz to come down to the office and call you,” she said, the words flowing so sweetly from her mouth you’d think she was made of honey.

That didn’t work either.

Then she got desperate. Started a list of everyone in her school who had phones, which was everyone except Emma. (And one other girl, but her parents barely use electricity so she doesn’t count, she told us.)

Try again, we told her.

This went on and on. It went on so long, my husband and I stopped listening. Believe it or not, she finally decided it was hopeless and stopped asking.

Which is when I had second thoughts.

It happened very innocently. She asked if she could go with a group of friends to the movies. Without adult supervision. Another mom who would drive them, but they would go into the theater by themselves, watch a PG movie, and be picked up in front of the theater when it was over. She was just a few weeks shy of her 12^th birthday and we trusted the mom and the other girls. So we said yes, after giving her the “stranger danger,” lecture, the “You wouldn’t follow your friends off a cliff, would you?” speech, and the always popular, “We trust you, we just don’t trust other people” explanation.

School was out. It was the middle of the afternoon. I was at work. And it was the longest two-hour movie in the history of film. I called my husband and said the words we knew one of us would speak eventually: Emma needs a cell phone.

Or as my husband correctly interpreted: I need Emma to have a cell phone.

Because if she had a cell phone, I could have texted her during the movie. “Everything OK?” She could have texted back, “Yes.” She could have called me if the other mom was late picking them up. If her friends ditched her. If she just needed to know I was there for her. If I just needed to know she was OK.

So we got her a cell phone. Her first text was to me.

“Thx, mom. U r the best.”

So are you, sweetie, so are you.

by Kelly Frick