I have been grounded exactly three times in my entire life. There was the time I was granted my own phone line at the tender age of 12, after I convinced my father that answering the phone like a junior manager in training (thank you for calling Ted’s Home Appliance) was ruining my tween existence. Except, I violated 8:30 pm phone curfew to talk to David McCrary and, upon discovery, tossed the slimline receiver into a beanbag in denial of my transgression. Spoiler alert: the rents saw the phone. Grounded. Then there was the time, a scant year later & the summer before high school, when I was asked, by a popular girl, no less, to go to THE MALL. “We’re all wearing tube tops & earth shoes. You do have a tube top, right?” Tube tops were not Ted’s idea of proper, nor was his daughter trying to slither out in a long sleeved shirt over a tube top. Grounded. Things went pretty well after these incidents. I was an easy kid to parent. I can say this, having had BOYS to parent. Then came 2019, my most recent offense. See, the minute my granddaughter, Chynna Rose, sees me, be that in person or via FaceTime, she skips right over the pleasantries. There’s no “Hi Didi” or “Look, it’s Didi, my amazing grandma.” Here’s what I get: Didi, you got a purple tiger? That’s when I’m supposed to whip my phone out and head straight to Pinterest to type “purple tiger” into the search bar. We look for pink snakes. We have to see orange sharks. A rainbow dinosaur gets me extra points. We can go on for ours with this digital scavenger hunt of ours. Then one day, out of nowhere, Chynna’s father, my son – the one I once grounded from my own mother’s house because he refused to tie his shoes in her presence YEARS after he learned how (she did it better), walked into the room and said, “Mom, that’s it. NO MORE PHONE.” Seems I violated the numero uno rule. No phones in children’s hands. Grounded. Oh, but I bit my tongue that day, seething over the unfairness of it all.
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