Yesterday I could not get the phone to stop ringing. All of the standard clichés leapt to mind: The phone was ringing off the hook! (Except, of course, that it’s a handset and a base—no hook.) The phone was attached to my ear! (Actually, I usually do speaker phone with clients so that I can look at files at the same time.) And so on.

This was particularly aggravating, yesterday, because my son was home sick. He’s an easy sickie; he’s happy to lay on the couch and watch cartoons or doze. Still, it’s not the kind of day where I want to be talking to clients for hours on end, if I had my druthers. (What the heck are druthers, anyway? Apparently I didn’t have them, yesterday.)

Anyway, the entire day was on the phone, off the phone, on the phone again, off the phone.

When I’m on the phone, I’m not getting work done. I mean, the calls are work-related but they’re time that I am not spending writing, so to me they are different than “productive” time. That is to say, a phone-full day already feels like one where I’m getting behind. I want to be writing, not talking to people about writing or planning meetings. It’s something that has to be done, of course, but you know what I mean.

Throw a sick kid into the mix, and you’re looking at the entire day being a wash.

Phone call. Check on child. Check email. Write for five minutes. Phone call. Check on child. Check email. Answer email. Phone call. Check on child. Phone call. Tear hair out. Get child some ginger ale. Phone call!

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Was the phone mightier than my pen (or my keyboard) yesterday? Sadly, yes. I accepted even before lunch that I would be up late last night doing my actual work, thanks to all of the faux-work I was tending to on the phone.

And then, of course, there was the matter of the long-suffering boy. He kept insisting that he was okay, and I should go do my “Mom Work.” Late in the afternoon when I had to get on a long conference call, I explained to the kids (my daughter had arrived home from school) that I really needed them to play quietly for a bit while I tended to just this one last call. They promised they’d be good.

They were good. They were so good, in fact, that after my call I went upstairs to tell them how impressed I was that they hadn’t fought or gotten loud. And I found… my daughter, happily working on a picture in her room. “Where’s your brother?” I asked her.

“I dunno,” she said. “He went that way.” She pointed towards his room. I peered in that direction and didn’t see him. There was, however, a large tangle of blankets in my line of vision. And they turned out to be (you guessed it) a sleeping burrito of sickly 8-year-old. I’d been on the phone for so long, he’d wandered off and taken a nap. And I’d been too busy on the phone to even know. Poor kid.

If you need me today, please don’t call me. I need today to recover, both in my work and in mommy-points!