The Party Line

So I get this call from my EX at 8:00 o’clock this morning.  When you are no longer employed outside the home, 8:00 a.m. seems like the dead of night even if you have been awake for an hour.  He begins by asking if I spoke with Dan before school today.  Mind you, Dan leaves the house in the dead of night (in this case the dead of night refers to 6:30 a.m.) in order to catch the bus to junior high.   What stepford wife wakes up at the crack of dawn just to pat her rugrat on the head and make sure he has drug money for school.  (Oh, I suppose that was lunch money … just goes to show … I’m not THAT kind of mother.)  I explain to my ex-husband that Dan leaves at 6:30 (because of course I have to defend myself for not seeing my teenage son off to school) and he follows up and asks me if I spoke to Dan last night.  I realize now this is going to be either a war crime interrogation or a shaggy dog story — either way I’m feeling the urge to punch something.

Finally he broaches the subject and starts off by saying Dan called HIM last night.  Wonderful!  Now we are getting somewhere!  He continues “Dan asks can he go to Brandon’s house and practice with his band.”  There is now a long strategic pause to see how I am going to react.  But it’s too early in the morning and I’m still not sure if there is a punch line coming or interrogation techniques so I keep my mouth shut.  The mini-series resumes by disclosing that Dan had shared with them that I wasn’t too fond of Dan being in a band, so he asked Dan on the phone … ‘Does your Mother know you are asking us?’ … and Dan affirmed ‘Oh, yeah, she doesn’t mind.’ At this point, I did let out a little chortle … but it could have just been phlegm, I hadn’t brushed my teeth or had a cup of herbal tea yet today.

There is another one of those uneasy pauses again and I feel the need to defend myself so I say some version of  “What I told Dan is that I didn’t want him to be spending time in a band while he was finishing up the term … You know he got a deficiency notice this week …” — blah, blah, blah, blah (I’m pretty sure even I stopped listening to myself at this point.)

“Yeah but that’s not the good part!” He interrupts.   Ooooh!  There’s a GOOD part to this story how cool.  Maybe this IS a shaggy dog joke after all.  He tells me that when Dan said goodbye that he didn’t hang up the phone right away and realizes that he was in fact on a party line with Dan’s band friends.  I let out another gasps — which was really a muffled finger pointing gesture ala Ashton Kutcher Punk’d.

“But there’s more!”  He continues. At this point I realize the Dan Reality Show has gotten renewed for another season and I really need that cup of herbal tea.  Heck I need a double espresso but I’m not THAT kind of mother either.  Dan launches off into serious bragging rights about how smooth he was in LYING TO HIS FATHER …

As the story goes, he listened to the kids talk for another 20 minutes. I did my obligatory concerned mother voice and asked if there was mention of drugs or other “real” problem issues.   He said no, but that he did un-mute the phone eventually and announced “You know Daniel when you are going to put people on a party call, you should never make the assumption that they have hung up.  We’ll talk about this over the weekend.”  Click.

We both laughed.  I found myself giggling all through the day, phoning all my close friends to retell the story, emailing several more to share the joke of the day because after all that IS the kind of mother I am!