The Hard Stuff

Today I happened to leave the office at the same time as my supervisor. This doesn't happen very often, as we rarely have concurrent arrival and departure hours. I have known this woman for more than 14 years, and as she is my senior by more than a decade as well as a mom of two grown children that she raised working full time through a divorce, I found her conversational comment surprising: I don't know how you do it, you're done working but you still have to go home and be a mom. So true. I often wonder that too.

But it's really the onset of adolescence that brings the sneaker attack, the Hard Stuff. I wish I meant the sudden appearance of adult beverages to soothe the heartaches at every turn. Being a mom of older kids has the obvious hallmarks akin to a paid job, shuttling hither and yon to lessons and practices and playdates (like work errands & procurements), managing schedules and homework deadlines (like work requirements and project deadlines), and keeping the sibling peace (like working with various EI types as coworkers and clients). It also comes with the monumental task of all the little things that happen in between, the emotional quandaries and especially the split-second media moments that launch, alleviate or darken the idiosyncracies of friendships.

My rule of thumb for my kids about living on-line in any form is that if you wouldn't say it out loud, don't say it or post it at all. A kind of media version of If You Don't Have Anything Nice To Say, Don't Say It. It seems like an easy One Rule. The toneless texting & online chatting trap is attractive and welcoming, gratifying and immediate. I get it. I'm just as enamored of these qualities. What I don't get is how our kids are going to know who is really there to support them when they are suddenly misunderstood, taken at too much more or less than face value. What I don't get is how choosing these less personal methods of communication crept right in and replaced good planning-ahead skills, long giggly phone calls with innate instantaneous awkwardnesses, and all the while cultivated the documentation of secrets.

So like any mom, I go to work, and then I go home to work some more. I grieve these changes and think on how to effectively lobby for their demise. I ask the parents of my kids' friends, who are also my friends, to think about adopting a similar reverence for face to face communication. There's nothing easy about eye-rolling and cold shoulders, but they're astronomically more complicated in the virtual world.