I’ve taken to switching my phone off when Pete gets home. This irks my Baby Buddy Alice, who likes to text me constantly, despite spending most of every weekday with Bernard and myself. I tend to think that if we’ve made an arrangement, then I don’t need her to text me to say she’s on her way, or that she’ll be on her way in a minute, or that she’s running a bit late but she’ll soon be on her way [she will generally send all three of those messages, in reverse order]. But that’s beside the point; it’s the evening calls and texts that irk me right back. In the evenings her text are even more superfluous, since we’ll have been chatting all day and there simply isn’t anything left to talk about until we have another night of babysleep to compare.
I like Alice immensely, and it’s not her that I have a problem with, it’s the intrusion of text messages into my peaceful evening. If I could switch the landline off as well, I would. Perhaps what I really need for my birthday is an answering machine, whereon I could record a message saying:
We are in, obviously, because we have a small baby and don’t really go out in the evenings at the moment. But right now we’re enjoying our only snatch of baby-free time all day, and I’m not sure you understand how much we will resent you disturbing it.
Let me explain: I love Bernard’s company, and there isn’t a moment in the day when I wish he wasn’t with me, even when he’s twisting and squawking in my arms in a bid to fight off the demon sleep. But the two hours a day when he’s asleep upstairs are precious, and I need them in order to continue to love having him around all day, and not mind getting up to feed him during the night: that’s my recharging time.
Those are the two hours when I can spend time with Pete, even if it’s just watching TV together, or knitting beside him while he uses the laptop, or grumbling about Alice’s endless text messages. Those are the two hours when we get to be a couple again, albeit without the bottle of wine. Again, we enjoy being a family very much, but sometimes in the whirl of us both doing babystuff, I miss him, and I just want our two hours to be hallowed and unpolluted by the outside world.
I think this is the most reasonable thing I’ve ever heard about parenting. You need your time with Pete and I think you could easily tell Alice that, and ask her to keep the texts to during the day. It’s invasive to have to turn your phone off completely – you might need it on for someone to call with something critically important.
The few people who could possibly have anything that important to say have my landline number. For everything else, there’s email.