Hopelessly Devoted to You

If I am ever inspired to write a memoir, I would label the chapters according to the roles I have played in my day: daughter, student, lawyer, wife, mother, teacher, caregiver, concierge.

Concierge? Yep, that’s me, just like the frumpy, cranky woman in Elegance of the Hedgehog, a book (I absolutely hated) by Muriel Barbery. How, you might ask, did I work my way down to this low paid, low talent, underachiever’s status in life? The answer is simple: I had children.

It isn’t a big stretch from soccer mom, to helicopter parent, to concierge. Here’s a sample of how it works. Daughter number one is on a semester abroad program in Europe. She’s on spring break on Gran Canaria, a Spanish island off the coast of Africa, and the internet on her phone isn’t working. Solution? Send a text message to Mom asking her to find a phone number for a taxi service on the island. I am immensely flattered that she trusts my technology capabilities – my daughter is no dope with respect to how to woo me – and on the third try I succeed in locating a number that actually belongs to a cab company. Even while I am busy praising myself on my computer skills, I do wonder why she didn’t wander down to the front desk of the hotel to ask the English speaking Swede who runs the place.

But truly, I know the answer to this question. It was easier to text me, 3000 miles and five time zones away, and my daughter knew I would jump right on the job. I would feel like a sucker in my concierge status if I were unique in my willingness to be used. Happily, or unhappily, I am not. Every mother of a certain age seems right there with me.

I didn’t even come up with the job title. I stole it from a friend, who is the president of the board of trustees of a world class college, a retired bank executive and an artist, when she is not dog walking, dropping clothes off at the dry cleaner, or waiting for appliance repairmen in the apartments of her two daughters who are busy making their ways as a lawyer and a doctor.

The examples abound. My college roommate recently spent an entire Sunday on Google maps and her cell phone while her son tried to navigate from their home in central Connecticut across New York and into Northern New Jersey to make it to his first paid acting job. He hadn’t focused on the Nor’easter that slammed the regions south and west of him, hadn’t left enough time anyway – in his mother’s opinion -- to make the trip, and then he kept running into roads that were closed by fallen trees and flooding. He blew off his mom’s advice about his departure time (“Mom, not everybody drives 50 on the highway like you do”) but was on the phone instantly when he ran into trouble. He missed the opening curtain but, with the help of his personal concierge and her laptop, he got there in time for his entrance.

I was standing on line at Dunkin Donuts behind a woman who got a phone call from her son at college in Pennsylvania who wanted to know whether he should eat breakfast then (it was 10), if he was having lunch at noon, and going to a Seder at 6. She told him what to do (which was eat; what else does a mother say to a son?) and placed her coffee order.

Another friend left a meeting she was attending when her college senior called up, freaking out that her ride home for spring break had changed plans and now she was stuck with too much stuff to shlep home on the train. The school is in Manhattan but it was pouring rain and rush hour so the round trip was inconvenient and endless but her mom made it anyway.

I have been known to spend hours on the phone with Expedia changing plane reservations for my daughter in Paris who doesn’t want to use up the minutes on her international cell phone and Expedia won’t let you make changes on line. I have another friend who scheduled a day around securing concert tickets for her undergraduate son because the internet portal opened up during one of his classes and he was sure the show would sell out before he got back to his computer. Then there is the mom who, from her home in New York, found an eminent doctor in Akra, Ghana, to treat the third-degree burn her daughter got from the exhaust pipe of a motorcycle. She has preferred not to ask how her daughter’s leg came in contact with the exhaust pipe because she has a pretty clear notion that riding motorcycles in Africa was among the dumb things her daughter wasn’t supposed to do on her semester abroad.

We replace their lost cell phones, get their shoes repaired, service their cars, and schedule their haircuts. We rack our brains for connections so they can land summer internships and first jobs. We revise their resumes, proofread their cover letters, and house them in recessionary markets. Occasionally, we try to be more than the unpaid help and we give unwelcome and unsolicited advice and then we elect not to notice when they ignore us. We wonder how we made it through college and our young adult years when we called our parents once a week, if that, from the phone in the hall.

Maybe it’s that most of the concierge mothers I know are or have been hard-charging professionals who often wished in their busy pasts that they had a mom to call the plumber or do the laundry. Maybe it’s because our kids can get hold of us any hour of the day or night from anywhere in the world. Maybe it’s because we love staying connected to them, even if it is at their convenience and when they need a job done.

I know there will be a time when my children don’t call me three times a day for “a huge favor” but by then maybe I’ll be too busy babysitting for their kids.