communicating with adult children

Life’s Funny

Life’s funny – that was something my dad said. And he’s right – life is funny. In later years he ‘d always tell us, “Thanks for the call,” after a phone conversation, making sure we knew how appreciative he was. And when we were saying goodbye after a visit, he liked to tell us, “The latch key is always out,” reminding us how welcome we were.  I can picture him saying those things while sitting in the big comfy chair that he’d made room for in their kitchen, toothpicks in his pocket, the newspaper on his lap, a cup of coffee if it was morning, tea if it was midday, at his elbow. In this image my mom is at the table counting their daily pills and vitamins into a days-of-the-week container. 

My dad has been gone three years. I wish ‘gone’ met he’d left home, maybe ran away before they had to move into a senior’s residence. But no, my dad has died. I worry my kids or grandkids will forget him if I fail to verbalize all his dad-isms, so I repeat them frequently and pray that they are listening and remembering. 

And life is funny, isn’t it? What, I wonder will they say about me – those kids and grandkids of mine? Will it be my too familiar – love the ones you’re with? (Meaning stop staring at your phone.) Mostly, I hope I’m passing on what my dad passed on, imagining I hold counsel  with much of what he believed in. He was a man of strong family values, maybe old-fashioned (he was born in 1928) but here’s hoping everything is new again. 

My dad believed in taking the family on a summer camping holiday every year. He believed in Sunday dinner and especially Sunday drives. Until he gave up his license at age eighty-six, he would help my mom into the car and together they’d do a thirty-mile circle from their city through the town he grew up in, stopping for egg rolls or ice cream as they drove through the rolling foothills.

He believed in a seafood feast on Christmas Eve and buying gifts, never gift certificates, though he’d cajole my sisters and I into shopping for our mom, on his behalf. He believed in going out for coffee in coffee shops, if not with our mom, then with his brothers. He had strong feelings about how kids should learn to skate and ride bikes, and as a frustrated non-swimmer he made sure all of his five kids were at least semi-accomplished aquanauts.

He believed in a beer with cheese and crackers before dinner, and tea and dessert afterwards. I remember that even on those camping trips in the woods, while mom prepared dinner on a coalman stove, he’d serve up our appetizers of sharp cheddar and crackers. Their after dinner campsite tea would be accompanied by a tin of something sweet from home. He always said chocolate cake should be served with red jello and a bit of whipped cream. 

My dad believed in picnics in the mountains as a weekend treat. We started the same tradition when our kids were babies. It never failed that they would fall sound asleep on the way and be left to dream, while my husband and I enjoyed the peace and our packed lunch. My dad believed you cover a sleeping person with a blanket, even in warm weather. It’s hard for me to resist copying that bit of coziness. 

Have I adopted all of his tenets to pass along? He believed in real cloth handkerchiefs and always had one in his pocket (yuk), and also carried wooden toothpicks. I prefer the plastic variety. He believed in connecting with the person serving you a coffee with a sampling of his wry humor. I’m not nearly as funny as he was, but I do try to get a smile. Who could argue with his stanch believe that family should come home for Christmas. We gathered around a table laden with baked salmon, a still icy shrimp ring, and fried oysters. My mom’s background was Ukrainian and so we dined on perogies, cabbage rolls and garlic sausage at Easter time, but on Christmas Eve my dad crushed crackers with a big glass rolling pin and us kids helped roll the oysters in the crumbs for her to crispy fry for our feast. 

Oddly, my kids don’t care for oysters, at least not cracker coated and fried, but I do them up every December 24thanyway, and talk about my dad and how the family feast meant the world to him.

It’s impossible to celebrate without invoking my dad’s memory and sharing his beliefs with those gathered around. My mom was his north star and his biggest belief was in his love for her. She gifted me with another set of values – the wonders of what she held to be true. Let me tell you about those in my next blog. And remember – do love the ones you’re with. 

Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal On Texting My Kids!

Texting, text, text, text. Text, text, text. Texting. It’s what we see all around us.  We are all staring down at our phones. Aliens spying from the heavens would believe it is the way us humans choose to communicate.  Sitting in a restaurant recently, gabbing away with a big group of family, we observed two young women sitting opposite each other in a booth waiting for their meals, but not looking at each other, just  texting, texting, texting.  One of the teens in our party suggested that they might be texting each other.

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I titled my book about the years my kids were departing home and all the transitions and escapades and sometimes strange and frightening times – Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest (available from Amazon).  It’s doubtful as I first started typing  away in my little office –  looking out over a snowy back yard, and then fresh buds of spring turning to leafy summer foliage, followed by autumn leaves scattering across the yard, and so it went round and round the years – that I could possibly have imagined how much even I would text.  Text, text, text. Text, text.

My pace was slow walking along Vancouver’ False Creek Seawall while texting my eldest daughter back in my home city. Walking and texting – one of those things you say you won’t do, but you do. The ding of an old-school style email interrupted the trill of another text.  The email was from Sue Shellenbarger, a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of their ‘Work & Family’ column. Shellenburger was asking if she could interview me about how parents and children communicate via text.  Wow, could she ever.  It’s a hot topic that I am known to go on about a bit too much, even as I continue to evolve my texting style with my twenty-something kids.  I’d tell her how the guys text differently than the girls, how my peers text differently than young people and that my sons have actually given me direction on how to illicit responses from them.

Nervous about being interviewed, in the next forty-eight hours I met up with or called, and yes texted, Zoë, Cole, Hudson and Lily. It was fun, and again educational to chat purposefully with my kids about texting.  I took copious notes and referred back to my own book. Shellenbarger was a calm and reassuring interviewer.  We had a long and engaging conversation.  I don’t know how that will translate to what appears in her Sept. 9th column in The Wall Street Journal.  It’s always curious to see how an interview is interpreted into a column.  I’ll share a link to it in a blog post next week, and if she doesn’t cover all my tips on texting with adult kids I’ll share those, too.tmlm with backpack

Vancouver, Canada’s most splendid west coast city has had a dry, hot summer. We were there to see our son Hudson’s film, Faith, win the  Audience Choice Award in a student film festival.  The weather turned the next day and the rains beat down as I drove to our cottage in B.C’s interior on the shore of Shuswap lake. Yesterday the clouds hung low, with rays of sun dappling the still green leaves only intermittently.  There was a melancholy mood to the day as I prepared for my upcoming departure to our Calgary home, stacking lawn chairs, scooping water out of the paddle boat before covering it for winter, bringing in a geranium too beautiful to be ravished by fall storms.  Yet, during all that I was involved in text conversations with all four of my kids. That isn’t a common occurrence anymore.  Days and days can go by without me communicating with some of them.  (The boys anyways.) They all had something novel come up and were sharing it with me; exciting, frustrating, a new challenge.  Each kid’s texting was representative of their personality, from fervent and fast-paced to calm and sporadic. kayak with feet

Today is different.  They’ve all gone back to their other tasks. It’s my sister and a friend whose texts trill to me this morning. The lake is calm. The sun is out. I vow to leave my phone in the house and go out in the kayak to paddle and wonder what Sue Shellenbarger will make of our conversation about text, text, texting in her ‘Work and Family’ column in The Wall Street Journal next week.  Stay tuned.