My War With Ma Bell

I know I’m the last of a vanishing breed, and a traitor to my sex, but I honestly think I’d be better off without a telephone.

There’s something about the insistent ringing of that infernal bell that can drive even the most modern housewife to drink. It is no respecter of time or convenience. Any imbecile with the mental age of a five-year-old can dial your number at any time of the day or night, and frequently does.

But by far the most popular time to call is between the hours of five and seven, when you’re cooking dinner, bathing and feeding children and trying to get the living room looking more like itself and less like a church basement after a rummage sale.

None of these calls is for me. They’re for the children, or for my husband, who’s a lawyer. Now I have yet to discover the reason for it, but a lawyer’s clients never call him at his office, probably because he’s too smart to be caught there. He’s always in court, or in conference, or having a snort at the nearest pub.

So they call me, outlining the details of a legal problem that would baffle Blackstone, while pots boil over, doorbells ring and children converge from all directions, crying, quarrelling and generally raising Cain. Taking a message is impossible. There’s never anything to write with anyway, unless you count the blood I’m going to shed the minute I get off the phone, because the baby’s diet currently consists of nothing but freshly sharpened pencils.

I admit that the foregoing contains just a hint of exaggeration. Of course not all calls come during the supper hour. They also occur while you’re in the bath, or locked out on the back veranda in nothing but your nightgown, or just as the baby has finally taken the hint after numerous pleadings and announces, “I have to make—NOW!”

I gave up asking my children answer the phone when I was busy after I overheard one of them say, “Mummy can’t come to the phone right now. She’s making a wee-wee. May I take a message?”

The telephone and my children are bound by the same magnetic attraction as the one between a cobra and a mongoose. As soon as they learn to dial a number your doom is sealed. I can stand their interminable shrieking and giggling with their friends. What I cannot stand, is having to make a vital call, such as to the fire department to announce that the baby has locked himself in the bathroom again, only to discover that the other child hasn’t hung up the receiver at her end, leaving my telephone completely out of commission, me in a fuming rage and my baby unrolling all the toilet paper out the bathroom window.

Actually, now that I think about it, that telephone is probably exacting long-overdue revenge for the indignities inflicted on it by my eldest, then aged two. I must say that the telephone repairman was very understanding. He spliced the cord together after a session with the scissors dismembered it, and removed the bubble gum she worked into the dial. He even replaced the receiver filled with apple juice. But he finally told me that he was sorry, but if she flushed the receiver down the toilet one more time, he would simply have to remove the telephone.

Haunted Houses

I was reading the other day about a family who is convinced that their house is haunted. It seems their soap and candy bars keep disappearing, and they keep finding poker chips in the bathroom and gum on the dining room floor.

I know exactly how they feel because my house has been haunted that way for years. There isn’t a candy bar made that could last two minutes around here, and we never have any soap. Not that anybody washes with it—their dirty necks prove that. What they do is carve it up for the art teacher at school, leaving soap shavings all over my living room rug.

This is normal. Things like candy, soap, sweaters and gloves were made to disappear. (We once misplaced every hair brush in the house, but that’s championship stuff and doesn’t happen every day.)

What I can’t understand is how an otherwise perfectly normal little girl could lose her underpants on the way to the grocery store without once letting go of my hand, a fact which was pointed out to me by several perfect strangers we met along the way. Actually, they weren’t exactly perfect, but then, so few of us are.

Naturally, not everything in my house disappears. Some things show up with a disconcerting disregard for logic, like ice cream bars in my underwear drawer and bedroom slippers in the freezer.

What drives me absolutely wild is never being able to find anything to write with. Now I buy pencils the way Howard Hughes buys hotels—without thought of expense or upkeep. Then I hide them from my children, who eat them for breakfast. (They must, because there’s never anything to write with, and there's all that toast and piles of Cheerios on the breakfast table every morning.)

Nevertheless, my pencils always disappear, only to turn up weeks later in the laundry hamper, the piano or the trunk of my car.

That’s why I can’t understand how anyone could be surprised to find poker chips in the bathroom and gum on the dining room floor.

I don’t know much about poker, but my experience with gum is legion, covering a span of fifteen years, three houses, four children and one nervous breakdown. I’ve cut gum out of hair, clothing and curtains; I’ve scraped it off windows, walls and floors; I’ve peeled it off plates and pillows; I’ve dug it out of ears and noses.

Gum stuck to the dining room floor? I should be so lucky!

What Not To Tell The Nanny

I’m in the process of writing a novel. I hadn’t meant to. I just meant to jot down a few notes for the nanny we hired to care for the children while we’re away, but like Topsy, it just grew.

I’m a little nervous about leaving on such a long trip right now. I wasn’t at first; not until I started writing down a few suggestions for the nanny to follow, only to discover that some things just can’t be communicated by words alone.

I mean, how can you write specific instructions on how to work a washing machine that you’ve lived with intimately for eleven years and still don’t completely understand? You know that when it makes that funny grinding noise you have to push the little doohickey on the bottom panel and give it a sharp bang on top, but would a perfect stranger believe it? Some things come intuitively with long experience and can’t be explained by logic alone.

It’s the same thing with my children, who are even more neurotic than my appliances. If a sweater is put in the second drawer of the dresser instead of the third, they become frantic. A wrinkle in the bedspread is enough to bring on complete hysteria. Merely getting them to bed at night involves participation in a ritual that would try the patience of a head nurse.

It took me three pages just to list the vegetables they won’t eat. Then I started on the things they’re not allowed to do, but after I’d covered several chapters, I realized that a twelve-volume encyclopedia would hardly do justice to the subject. The trouble is, that I can’t think of what to forbid them to do until after they’ve done it, and they, like lightning, never strike twice. I simply haven’t the imaginative powers necessary to anticipate disaster.

For instance, they’ve all been given a list of instructions: “Don’t finger paint in the living room”, and “Don’t eat ice cream bars before breakfast.” But who in her right mind would think to tell them, “Don’t take all the shoe laces out of the shoes and flush them down the toilet”?

That bathroom bowl is the focal point of most of my difficulties. You’d be amazed at the number of ordinary household objects that can be flushed down it. The baby is the worst offender, which makes me a little bitter, since he’s still not toilet trained. I suppose he knows that something is expected of him in that department, and since he can’t or won’t oblige, he feels he must offer a reasonable substitute.

And their gourmet demands at mealtime—I simply can’t go on. I’m going to abandon all thought of leaving instructions for the nanny. There’s no point in building up her prejudices before she’s even in the door. We’ll be gone two weeks—ample time in which to discover their little peccadilloes all by herself.

Motherhood

There’s something about impending motherhood that brings out the beast in most casual observers: if you’re pregnant, they’ll ask you why; if you aren’t they’ll wonder why not. There’s simply no pleasing the average busybody.

When I returned from my honeymoon, everyone sat around waiting for my announcement of prospective parenthoold. When I was expecting my fourth, the situation was completely reversed. (I didn’t have to announce this one; all I did was show my pea-green face in public and salacious rumour did the rest.)

My family and friends were horrified, my neighbours appalled at the news. At parties, people went out of their way to talk about overpopulation and the efficacy of birth control.

Strangely enough, they took the opposite tack with my husband. Female friends began eyeing him speculatively, and every male within jabbing distance took to giving him knowing winks and playful pokes.

The questions directed at mothers-to-be are always profuse, personal and in the worst possible taste. Once charmer came right out and asked me whether the baby was planned. Another coyly asked me the ages of my other children, as though I hadn’t already figured out that in five years I’d be sending the youngest off to kindergarten and the oldest to university the same day. I guess when you have four children, unless they’re quadruplets, you’re bound to have them occupy various levels in the educational system.

As the proud mother of three daughters, I particularly resented constantly being asked if I was hoping for a boy. I never knew how to answer this question, and often wished I had the nerve of my five-year-old, who made no bones about the fact that she’d much prefer a Shetland pony.

Why did I have a fourth child? Callous friends say it was to give me something to do. After all, when her youngest trotted off to kindergarten, every mother I know either went to work or bought a dog. I took the easy way out. I don’t know much about dogs, but I have yet to see a child who didn’t eventually mature enough to grow out of diapers.

Actually, the speculators are all wrong. My husband hit on the real reason for my maternal re-awakening. I heard him tell a friend recently, “My wife will do anything to get material for another story.”