Text Me, Baby, One More Time

As a perpetually busy working mom, I communicate with friends and family in frantic, haphazard ways. Out of necessity, I have had to adopt faster and faster methods of sending communiqués to my near and dear. Email puts me at the mercy of an internet service provider who may or may not be having a good day. Plus, I need to be stationary in order to compose an email, and I have precious little stationary time. Thus, my preferred method of communication has become the cell phone--and I don’t mean SPEAKING on the cell phone because I often can’t hear the other party over the baby crying and the three year old repeatedly asking me WHY the baby is crying. Instead, I send texts.

A word about text messaging: I love it. It provides you with a convenient method of almost instantaneous communication without the need to actually speak to another human. It is selfishness at its most basic and, surprisingly, no one is offended by it. Each text implies that someone wants to inform you of something or tell you to do something, but that someone doesn’t want to give you a chance to respond, or at the very least, doesn’t want to hear your voice as you respond, and certainly doesn’t want to take any time with you other than to get his or her own message across, because really? You’re just not that important. The reason no one is offended by this? Because the text message receiver doesn’t want to hear your voice either!

For those busy working moms out there who do NOT text, you really, really, really need to invest in a good texting package. Oooh, and when even texting is too time consuming, you can always take a picture or series of pictures with your cell and send those in lieu of a text. Example: a picture of your howling infant, a picture of your three year old covered in finger paint, a picture of your angry face, and a picture of the clock approaching the six o'clock hour are often all it takes to get your husband to leave the office and pick up Boston Market on the way home.