I know I've mentioned before that my oldest child is not much into communication...at least not with us. Judging by his texting record, he knows how to do it--A LOT.
Let's be honest, though, how teens text can hardly be called communication. "You suck." "No, You suck." "No YOU suck" "Huh-uh" "Uh-huh" and so on. (And oops--I actually included punctuation there for a second. As if.) I've texted with my son. He answers most of my queries with "You would" or "Maybe" as in:
(Me) I need you to come home for dinner.
(Him) You would
(Me) So you'll be home at 6:00?
(Him) Maybe
(Me) I'm going to be upset if you're not here.
(Him) You would
(To be fair, he always does what I ask him to, so I enjoy his sarcastic little answers. I might even do the same to him. But admitting all of that would ruin my point, so let's pretend this paragraph doesn't exist.)
When I succumbed to the Facebook pressure, I hesitantly sent a friend invitation to my son. I could just picture him cringing at the thought of letting his mom into this corner of his life. I was pleasantly surprised when he accepted my invitation right away (not with any fanfare, mind you--there was no "Look everyone! My mom's here! Hooray!!!).
Having access to my son's Facebook wall has opened up a whole new world of deep communication for us. He's pretty diligent about updating his status on there. Sure, most of the time what he posts makes absolutely no sense (which is the way he likes it IMHO.), such as this one: "Shnookie 1 is rain master." Ooooookaaaaay...
HOWEVER, a lot of the time I get more out of his little one-liner synopses than I could ever gather from 3 sentences of forced face-to-face conversation. For example, yesterday I bopped on over there and found this little gem: "Shnookie 1 is happy with everything that's going on." Whoa. That's just too much information for mom to handle--especially in complete sentence format. He almost sounds--dare I say it--like an actual mature person.
(I wonder where he learned sarcasm?)
It is rather ridiculous how happy Shnook 1's statement made hubby and me. If you have one of those 'can't shut them up' teenage boys (I'm sure they're out there...somewhere...maybe?), this might not make sense to you. But for ME, I'm walking on air. It's the most revealing conversation he and I have had all year.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
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4 comments:
You've given me hope! Here I thought I'd just have to wait till my son was married so his wife could tell me how he was doing. I'll be getting him facebook sooner rather than later. Of course there's the "accept as friend" hurdle but I've got to try!
For now I'm pretty good at interpreting grunts. Kind of like how a baby has different cries, that sort of thing.
They eventually give you grunts?! PRAISE GOD!!
Hahahah Erin this is awesome. I guess having all girls in my fam I've never really thought about it.... Awesome. And keep stalking away. :)
I enjoy becoming friends with my kids' friends and then stalking them too. It opens up a whole new world of information (some of which I don't always want to know.)
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