Cupcake has her own cell phone.
Yes, you read that right: she. has. her. own. phone. And yes she is exactly nine-almost-ten.
You may call her spoiled. You may call me indulgent or a pushover or an idiot or an indulgently idiotic pushover. You may be right, but I don't care.
Well actually I do care because I want everyone to like me and accept me and invite me to birthday parties.
On the other hand, you might agree that I have an airtightly (is too a word) legitimate reason for giving a cell phone to a fourth grader.
Her brother got a phone in third grade, so I have a track record for early phone givage (is so a word). You may call him spoiled. You may call me an indulgent idiot but please do it out of my earshot because I'm sensitive about those things.
But I had a darn good reason for giving him a phone when he was eight.
We took light rail to get to a baseball game. Cupcake and I got on one car and Robey went for another, but the doors closed before he could get on either car. There he was on the outside, looking horrified, and there we were on the inside, being horrified. Twenty-five passengers pounded on the doors and tried to pry them open, while twenty-five more banged on the emergency bell cord. The train moved a few feet and then stopped and the doors opened and fifty hands dragged Robey inside.
The incident squashed any rudimentary desire Cupcake might have had to attend or even watch baseball games for the next four years. She's finally getting over it now that our team is having a good season.
The next week I got Robey a plain, simple phone he could take to Disney World or Six Flags or the ball park, or the men's locker room at the JCC, or any place where he might have to use the men's room. We spent a lot of time monitoring the whereabouts and well-being of the phone; whether (and how) he managed to keep track of it in all those bathrooms I don't know, and I don't think I want to know. What I do know is that the phone, a status symbol for him, was a security blanket for me.
As a single parent I had no other options. Would you ask a strange man to watch your kid in a public bathroom at the stadium?
I didn't think so. Neither would I.
And that's why Cupcake now has a phone: because once a week she's attending Greek classes, at a time of day when Robey will have to be picked up and dragged to the next activity. We don't know a soul at the Greek Orthodox church; why would we? And I'm sure they're all very nice people. But if I'm going to leave her in a place where if there were a tornado or a blizzard or a dinosaur invasion (it could happen!) she might be lost in the shuffle because nobody knows us, she has to have a phone.
For my security as well as hers.
What do you think of me now?
