MY PRIVATE CALLER
Lori Gottlieb

I’m in the checkout line at Best Buy paying for an righteen-feature Panasonic phone when I realize I might finally be free of my mother. It says so right on the box: The phone that will change your life!

It’s just an ad slogan, but to me it’s a sign, maybe even a message from God. At the very least, it’s validation from the universe that getting Caller ID for the sole purpose of screening my mother’s calls won’t give me cancer, as my guilty conscience fears, but might actually, well, “change my life.”

“ Whoa….” I say to the cashier while pointing at the bright orange letters so she can share my life-changing moment. But she just looks at me like I’m retarded or stoned.

At home, I gleefully unpack the phone, programming in my numbers, learning how to work the Caller ID. It’s an ordinary white cordless model, but I treat it with reverence, like it has magical powers. It will take magic to keep my mother at bay.

Don’t get me wrong: My mother’s not abusive or even mean-spirited. She’s just, well, Jewish. Which means she loves me more than life itself, but nothing I do is good enough, even though I’m perfect, because, after all, I take after her. A dubious honor, but still.

Lori Gottlieb is the author of the bestselling memoir, Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self, an American Library Association "Best Books 2001" selection. A commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered” and singles columnist for The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Time, People, Elle, Glamour, Redbook, Slate, and Salon, among many others. Her personal essays also appear in the anthologies Scoot Over, Skinny and This Side of Doctoring. Her next book, a collection of humor essays about dating, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. She lives in Los Angeles, where she also writes for television.