Okay, I have a confession to make. I am on Facebook. I have been on there for a few months now. I guess now that both of the beach urchins have friended me on there, I can come out of the closet.

I resisted FB for a long time for a lot of reasons that boiled down to not wanting to stalk my kids on-line. I mean, I kind of tried that once. It didn’t start out as stalking. When Lizard first went to college almost seven years ago, I thought I would be really cool and try to communicate with her via Instant messenger. I had friends who talked to their kids at college by I/M all the time. Well. After about three sessions of I/M, her very appropriate reply was, “Moom, don’t you have anything to *do*?” And then there were cryptic “away” messages sometimes that would make me wonder things like, “did she flunk a test?” or “Does everyone at the college hate her?” or whatever. I know that she was just writing random stuff like I sometimes put on Twitter now and I finally realized that I was kind of stalking and I didn’t want to do that, so I talked some sense into myself and backed off. And of course, she was fine. Er, except for the time she fell on ice and thought she had broken her arm but that’s a whole ‘nother story and we used the phone for that discussion.

The truth is that I have never felt like I’ve had any reason to mis-trust either of my kids. I very fondly remember when Liz was in middle school and we’d come home late from a play rehearsal and I’d veg out on the couch in front of old Taxi re-runs while she would I/M kids she’d just left an hour or so earlier. Those were good times and I never felt like I had to look over her shoulder or search for her chats on the “family” computer we had in those days. I figure my kids have probably done some things they might not want to tell me about but I have never been afraid they’d do something stupid like hook up with some pervert from [insert-state-here] and run away from home. I am not the best moom but I think my kids have felt safe here for the most part. And I do have the *best* vacation place!!!

And so, when Facebook became available to all of us baggy old people, I didn’t join. Until. A long-time Planet Ann Arbor friend landed in the horspittal and almost died and her family was doing updates on her condition via Facebook. In minutes, I had a Facebook account. Since I had an account, I very tentatively looked around and found a very old friend from grade school. I *very* tentatively sent her a friend request thinking, “why the heck would anybody want to connect with me?” Next thing I knew, I was at a *wonderful* high school mini-reunion!!! I continue to connect with old friends slowly but last week, I confessed to my older beach urchin that I was indeed on Facebook and now I am friends with both of my kids. And a whole slew of other relatives because of it.

Love y’all. -KW

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.