I remember when I was a young girl and I used to exchange handwritten letters with a couple of different people in my life, one a great aunt and other a penpal I’d been connected to through a school project. I would spend a good amount of time crafting my letters, trying to convey the details of my days into interesting tidbits and sprawling cursive letters. After I had addressed the envelope and affixed the stamp to the top right hand corner and dropped it in an official mail collection box, the waiting and the anticipation began. Almost as soon as the postbox flap closed on my letter, I was already looking forward to the response I eventually would receive in the mailbox attached to the front of our house.
While it’s not quite the same thing, the buzzing of my cell phone announcing the arrival of a text sometimes can elicit a similar sense of anticipation, especially if I have recently texted a friend to share something happening in my life. Not all texts are created equal, however. My phone is too often peppered with messages from companies about an upcoming or ongoing sale and with reminders for appointments for one of our girls. These kinds of boring alerts definitely make the ones from the people who matter to us more exciting and more eagerly received.
Although our teenagers do not yet have cell phones, they do each have an iPad, purchased to encourage their creative pursuits through apps like Procreate and provide them access to their favorite playlists on Spotify when we head out in the car. Their iPads also allow them to text and they do so regularly with me and I have come to appreciate that way texting nurtures our already pretty strong connection.
Similar to the inside jokes and repeated movie lines our family has developed and that I’ve described in previous posts, my teenagers and I have also developed a series of familiar daily texts replete with specific emojis and turns of phrases adopted specifically for these no-context texts. We often exchange photos of our cat, Zuzu, in various sleeping positions, memes, and simple single emojis sent with animation (like an inflating heart or an echo of the emoji face filling the screen). We have a family text thread and I have a text thread with my two teenagers as well as a thread with each of them separately, and each one provides a little piece of joy or silliness to the day in bite-sized, text-sized pieces.
For my girls, there is also that sense of anticipation, awaiting a response to such a text, I believe is similar to my waiting for a letter from my great aunt, just on an abbreviated timeline. In fact, there are times when my 16 year old will let me know she sent me a text as a way of letting me know she’s still waiting for me to send her a reply. While I am typically pretty reliable when it comes to responding, there are times I get distracted, but always I want to make sure I send that expected reply because I love this extra connection I get to share with my teenagers.
For example, I look forward to getting a text sent to me and my husband from our 14 year old each night after she finished her Duolingo lessons. She sends us updates on her lessons or in what place she is in her league that week, usually with a screenshot and a witty comment. My favorites tend to be when she sends us a screenshot of a silly sentence she encounters and adds her own funny commentary. My 16 year old, on the other hand, likes to send me the single animated emoji text or even a text with a face created from various keystrokes that look like this, :3. Usually these are her way of checking in from upstairs, and I (almost) always reply immediately with my go-to emoji for her, 😘. At times we will also exchange text bursts initiated by her sharing a picture of her current glam metal crush.
When it comes to teenagers, I think we do well to meet them where they are and to engage in ways that are meaningful to them. While I may not be as fluent in memes or keystrokes, I’m fairly certain they sense their texts matter to me. And why wouldn’t they? I tend to stay in touch with friends and some family members in the same way. Just because my girls and I live in the same house doesn’t make these small connections any less of a means to remind them how much they matter to me and to share in the small things that can sometimes be breezed by or overlooked because of the speed of life’s To Dos. I count it both fun and meaningful that my phone is often abuzz with my connection to these two amazing young women.