A fellow only child asked me recently what I said first when I call my parents.
I had to think about it. “Hi,” mostly. I might say “Hi, it’s me,” some of the time. But anything else? Never.
That, my fellow “only” said confidently, is because you still think you’re the center of the universe.
I disagreed (as only children who are accused of being self-centered invariably do). It’s because, well, what other kid would call them? Forget that I’m no longer a kid, and that plenty of other female adults surely call them daily. Because they recognize my voice, then. Because I know they’ll know it’s me. Because my mother (and my dad) always knows it’s me.
I started asking around — what do other people say, when they call home? I even asked for video —without telling anyone what I was after. (Total strangers on the street, incidentally, are really, really not willing to suddenly call their mom in front of my video camera.)
What I found, in my unscientific survey of strangers and friends willing to answer the question, is that no matter how many siblings they have, other people say exactly what I say. There were exceptions (there’s one in the middle of the video, above), and generally, the more brothers and sisters someone had, the more likely they were to say “Hi, it’s [your-name-here],” but most of us seem to just figure that our parents will know who’s on the other end of the phone, and it’s a confidence that predates caller ID.
Obviously, not everybody has a great relationship with their parents. Mothers and daughters, in particular, range from “most frequently called” on each other’s cellphones through healthy friendship right down into toxic. But even then, most of us call home once in while.
And apparently, home is the place where you don’t even have to give your name.
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com
