Confessions of a Junkie

Okay, y’all, I think I’m addicted to the telephone.  It started back when I was a teen, when I would hide away in my tiny bedroom and gab for hours and hours with friends, those very friends I had just spent the entire day in school gabbing with.  Later on, I would sneak late night conversations with my boyfriend up in Maine, sometimes we would talk almost all night.

My friends know that I pick up, so if they have a minor crisis in their lives, they call me.  I, too, have a short list of friends I know I can always call.  When I see the number on the caller ID, I sense that the call will last more than a few minutes, but I think guiltily of the times they have been there for me, and I pick up.

But it doesn’t stop there.  These days, whenever the telephone rings it is a welcome interruption to what I should really be doing, and while I half know that I should let it go, I almost always pick up.  I answer to telemarketers, take surveys on politics and solar energy, politely decline donations to the policeman’s retirement funds, and take the time to explain to the mortgage callers that I am not the person in charge of the financial decisions.

What happens in the meantime?  My kids drift away from their lessons, overflow the bathtub, ask to play in the backyard, or sit and pout.  I have promised them, the people I love the most, over and over again, that I will stop, but they know by now that I don’t really mean it.

I think that today my heart hit rock bottom.  I was on the phone earlier today, distracting another mother from her family, while we both should have been getting dinner ready, and my middle son came to show me something from a children’s magazine.  I gestured him away, with a look that implied the rudeness of the interruption.  Just now, at his school desk, I found the project he had been trying to show me.  It was an intricate cutting work  to make a comic movie wheel, really a neat science project, and something that he would not have been able to do just a few months ago.  He had done all the work to cut out the notched wheel, and he needed my help to find a push pin to finish the project.  He also deserved my enthusiastic response to his effort and interest.  This is a child who is starting to grow up, right under my nose, but I am too busy with other people to view him as anything other than an interruption.

Enough is enough.  Tomorrow morning, I am turning off the ringers.  If it is an emergency, it will have to wait, because the only people who really depend on me are the six who will be within my walls, and I need to be there for them, really and truly present, not just in the building.  I am available for girls nights out on the third Wednesday of each month, let’s talk in person.  If we have business to do, please send an email.

I know that this is all sort of silly, but please say a prayer for me, for some self control in this area.  If the phone doesn’t ring for a few hours, I am likely to get itchy to call someone, but I am going to try to do both of us the favor of just getting through the moment.  I think, like many other bad habits, this is one that can be broken, with effort, in a surprisingly short amount of time.  Isn’t that one of the beauties of Lent, that God gives us the grace to see the things that we are abusing, that we are too attached to?

This is really an extension of my Lenten goal of loving, because I am not truly available to the people I am primarily here to love and serve when I am on the phone.