My mother recently found a tactic to get me to make contact with her, and I am ashamed to admit that it has worked. She stopped texting me. This is a 180-degree twist on her usual habit of sending me dozens of texts, all suggesting there is some sort of emergency. There’s a routine: I receive a text saying, “Call me immediately.” I call, assuming she has had a fall, or needs urgent help, and she will say: “Darling, how do you pronounce the name of the James Bond fellow? Is it Daniel Crack?”
It is fair to say that I am generally very bad at keeping in touch – with everyone. When I read a text, my brain seems to think that I have replied to it, and so I am often genuinely surprised when people tell me I haven’t. My mum has been a regular recipient of this lack of consideration, and I have long assumed this is just a character quirk we are all going to have to learn to love. But then a counsellor told me that if I don’t take action, this will be something that haunts me for ever. I may be paraphrasing, but she seemed pretty certain that I needed to do something, partly because I want to show my mum more love but mainly because I don’t fancy being visited by my mum’s ghost, saying: “You never called me, you dickhead.”
So I decided to be a better son, brother and husband by keeping in touch with everyone a lot more. And that intention was helped further by my mum’s sudden decision to stop getting in touch. Usually, I reckon I get two or three texts from her a day. Then, one week, I got nothing. Like, properly nothing.
My psychological response was incredible, and typical of all children: completely unjustified anger. “Isn’t she worried about me? Why has she decided she doesn’t give a shit any more? This is properly out of order!”
I then texted her, asking if she was OK and why she hadn’t been in touch, and she replied: “I know you’re busy, so I don’t want to bother you. Also, I’m very angry that you didn’t tell me I was wrong about the Daniel Crack thing.”
It was definitely a ploy and it was an effective one. I have spent the last few weeks enjoying much more regular contact with her, having conversations where the key information is relayed and discussed during the first minute of the call, and then that minute is repeated over and over for the next half an hour, like a sort of conversational Groundhog Day.
This morning we went to breakfast together at a Harvester and it was delightful. My mum did her usual thing of asking to have whatever I was having (it was the vegan option, stereotype-reinforcingly called the hipster breakfast and involving an abused avocado) and then really not enjoying it. The other thing that my mum likes to do is go to somewhere like a Chinese restaurant and then demand a pizza because that’s what she fancies. She talked about her friends at work, how one of her colleagues had told her that my beard makes me look homeless, and that I shouldn’t worry about anything because I am so funny and wonderful (she is so supportive that I actually sometimes ask her to dial it back a little bit). I also pushed her as to whether the “no-texting” thing was a strategy and she replied: “I know my son.”
Which is true, but also ignores the fact that it has taken her more than 30 years to achieve success. We have now decided that breakfast together is going to be a weekly thing. Which probably gives me even less reason to text her.
