If you are reading this, likely you remember the long phone cord. I spent half of my adolescence on a long phone cord, in the laundry room where I had a desk and a closet where I would often sit and talk about all the things I was certain my mother wasnʻt hearing.
Thank goodness I had a mother that knew almost everything, yet let me have a corner in the world to hide from and and reconfigure the world.
On that phone cord my world was small. I mean, I was sitting in the closet whispering to my best friend Erika Babiak about the boys we liked in school and imaging which one we would kiss or pretend into which one we want to give us their football jersey (Yes, true story that only came to my mind as I sat to type this out. That is the amazing thing about the mind, you have to sit with it to get the treasures stored). Anyway, Erika was a cheerleader so a lot of our meandering of mind revolved around the football field. Or complaining about teachers. Or parents. Or scheduling our outfits or coordinating our Friday night trips to the mall. Or planning on stealing a cigarette (yes, a singular cigarette) from her Aunt (that she saw on the weekends) that we would try and smoke in the Sears bathroom.
Very little of that scenario exists anymore. All those imaginations and curiosities lived in the boundaries of that laundry room and really long phone cord, and what seemed adventurous to us then is merely child’s play now.
Enough was difficult that the trouble we could get into largely lived in our minds. No one was using social media to share our secret snickers. No other energies were intercepting our teenage thoughts, except that click of a parent picking up a phone, unannounced and saying, “Oops” or “Itʻs dinner time, hang up.” And either could happen at any moment.
Boundaries.
Where are the boundaries now?
I remember standing in the doorway of my parents’ bedroom with my stepfather holding a thing called “The Brick.” My parents were explaining how Brian, my stepfather, would be on call for the weekend and the Brick — they motioned to this tannish brown, brick looking thing, heavy in his hand with buttons that resembled a mini-keyboard and a thin screen.
“What is it?” I asked. I can remember its presence, whether that was the technology or two young parents figuring out what “on call” now met for a technology manager.
“This weekend if work needs me they’ll send me a message here and I have to respond.”
On a weekend? I remember thinking. I was in seventh grade, even I knew it was peculiar. But maybe it’s not “even I knew” maybe the kids are the ones giving us live-time feedback on our current cultural choices.
The Brick came into our household while I was on the long phone cord, and our answering machine was running off a tape. The Brick came when kids still spent 82% of their time outside, and TV was Saturday morning cartoons so parents could catch a breath. The Brick was being built brick by brick, and the line of our boundaries were softening ever so imperceptibly because that “was the way things were.” It “was work” which was the one of two ever acceptable answers in our family structure.
I am not anti-technology, look at you and me here on Substack, and yet I am glad that I did not walk my teen years without the boundary of that phone cord. I stay up at night sometimes, mind skying on how I will protect my four year old son from a boundary-less world. Where every whim is allowed because it is.
And I wonder, although I know we needed to soften our boundaries and expectations as a natural evolution, I wonder if some of us even understand that the franticness, the anxiety, and the sleeplessness weren’t so prevalent when we all had those phone cords and a ideas that things had a place and boundaries helped us hold ourselves and our whims from creating that which never needed to exist further than a phone call with a friend.
What do you think? Do we know boundaries? Or have we lost them?
More next week…