Text messaging: Like mother, like daughter

The family's sitting at the dinner table, which is rare to begin with. We are even engaged in face-to-face conversation when I hear it — the unmistakable buzz of a text message bouncing off the salmon fillets.

My teen-aged daughter keeps her eyes on mine, as I locate the home-wrecker, the infiltrator: her red Razr, half hidden in the shadows of her dinner plate. She doesn't dare pick up the phone, as we continue our conversation.

But I know what she wants to do.

And she knows I know.

I turn for half a second to say something to her little brother. And quick as a flash — that girl is quick on the text follow-up — "Hi, Lauren," she whispers into her phone, her eyes at the same time catching the parental disapproval in mine. It's all part of the cell phone culture. "Actually, Lauren, I'm eating dinner with my family. Can I call you back?"

It's important to note that Lauren is one of my daughter's more, shall we say, "complex" friends, which might actually be a redundant phrase when you're a teenage girl. No matter that I marinated the salmon overnight. Lauren could be in crisis. And my daughter, like any good female friend, has learned to be available 24-7, which she certainly can be, thanks to AT&T and the marvels of cellular communication.

To AT&T's credit, they sent me an e-mail the other day marked, "Set sensible limits on your child's wireless phone use." The email might be a knee-jerk response to all the "sexting" publicity of late; The Wall Street Journal earlier this month reported that 20 percent of teenagers said they had sent nude or semi-nude photos via the Internet or cell phone.

Or maybe the cell company is targeting me because one of the phones in my package sent and received 5,231 texts last month, which could only mean there's a teenage girl in the family whose limits need sensibilizing.

Of course, the real question remains: How can I set sensible limits for my daughter if I can't set sensible limits for myself? How can I tell my daughter to keep her red Razr away from the dinner table when I can't be more than five feet away from my black one? I mean, what if my sister needs me?

Clearly modern society would have been better off if we had established solid sexting/texting rules, not to mention solid female relationship boundaries, before we got caught up in the habit of typing LOL while walking, eating and going to the bathroom, never mind running a red light.