I wrote the following story in 2009 for a creative writing class I was taking (I got an A if I remember correctly!). It was later published in the The Townline Newspaper as a guest column. They say writers write what they know and this is true! The following story is exactly how it happened. I did not change the names to protect the innocence.

The click-clack of text messaging was coming in a constant stream from the back seat of my car. Viewing them in the rearview mirror there sat my daughter and her best friend, both of them, heads down, thumbs moving at the speed of light. Every once in a while they would giggled, in unison, which prompted me to ask, “Are you two texting each other?” My daughter looked up at my reflection in the mirror and with a look of exasperation, confirmed my worst fear with a simple blank stare, they were. Which meant that either they were talking about me or talking about something they did not want me to know. Damn technology.

I had put off the cellphone for as long as I could. I remember the first day she came home from school and begged me for a phone, she was seven. Shortly after we attended a school function and I saw little girls, who should have been home playing with dolls, heads down, faces aglow by the blue light of their cellphones.. They could text LOL, BFF, WTF before they could even write. My daughter was the rare child who wrote her papers spelling the word “are” correctly and not just “R”.

When she got to middle school the pressure to comply with the culture was even more intense. She used every opportunity to her advantage. One evening, after a track meet, I was late picking her up, so she went home with someone else and I spent the next three hours trying to find her! When I finally had her safe in the car she said, “If I had a cellphone I could have called you.” I was not going to be swayed, insisting that I had rather enjoyed the past three hours! She needed to remember, she was one of five children, if I lost her, I had spares.

When she turned 14 she began earning her own money through babysitting. Seeing an opportunity to teach her some responsibility I finally relented on the cellphone, provided she pay for the entire thing herself. She has never missed a monthly payment, bought her first phone and then upgraded to the pink model later. She can’t download fancy ringtones or watch movies on her phone. What she does have is unlimited text messaging, and that has created a line of communication that doesn’t involve me.

So the giggling from the back seat continued. I was taking my daughter and her best friend to the movies. The pretense of a conspiracy was grating on my nerves so I began asking the “mother questions.”

“What movie are you going to see?” I asked.

“Nick and Nora’s Infinite Play List” came the reply without a look up from the text messaging.

“Who else is going to be there?”

“Me, Jennifer and Carley.”

“Any boys?” I asked. Silence. I looked in the rearview mirror and I saw two heads come up from their phones and then they stared at each other. “I asked a question. Are there going to be any boys at this movie?”

“Well of course there will be boys at a movie theater mom! Geez, it’s not a girls only theater.” came my daughter’s reply. Oh she was smooth, nice try, but I had been a teenager too.

“I meant, will there be any boys meeting you and your friends at the movies?” I asked again sternly. Silence and then “Yes. Joey Benaossi.”

She said it with defiance, staring at me in the mirror, meeting my eyes straight on. She showed no fear. She had made a decision to meet a boy at the movies and now pressed to reveal that decision she was prepared to defend it. This was a defining moment in our mother/daughter relationship, I had to tread lightly, how I handled this would set the stage for all our future battles. My mind raced through all the boys I knew from the track team, chorus, and even the boys from when she was in kindergarten. But I could not place the name of this new boy. This Benaossi boy, he sounded Italian and visions of a swaggering male meeting my daughter at the movies was driving me up the wall. What if he was in college!! “Who’s Joey Benaossi?” I asked.

It seemed like a reasonable question to me. But the laughter that came from both girls caught me off guard. It wasn’t just a few of those, “we pulled one over on your mom!” kind of giggles, this was deep from the gut laughter. The texting was forgotten momentarily as tears spilled from their eyes as they roared at my expense. “What? Who’s Joey Benaossi?” I shouted, frantically looking in the mirror to try and figure out what was happening. My daughter leaned forward in the seat, touched my shoulder and said, “Not Joey Benaossi, Mom!! Joey, Ben AND Ozzy.”

As they continued to roar with laughter in the back seat, I found myself the butt of their joke. I had met the challenge of this first test of wills with my teenage daughter and proven that I was a moron. I would become the laughing stock of the teenage world. And true enough, every time she leaves the house now and I ask, “Who are you hanging out with?” she replies “Joey Benaossi!” and then laughs. My fate has been sealed.

True story!