Relating….
Did I mention I have a new baby daughter? I’ll mention no names, but she is something else completely. Now I have a whole new question to ponder.
How will I ever relate to a child 51 yrs younger than me? She is not my grand-child (thankful). She is my daughter and she will and should expect the same as the two older sisters have had. So, when she is 4-5 I should be helping her in the waves at the beach, or when she is 10 I should be going tree-surfing with her….right?
Let’s see. But that isn’t about relating, that is playing. I recently decided to join snapchat. I did this to message my teenage daughters….one of them responded a little bit for around a week. Then stopped. The other never accepted my friend message…
The first said she now uses Tiktok and the other said “lets stick to SMS dad”. I’m OK with how it is. Both back to texting with me. The other ‘unspoken’ message they sent me was to not try so hard. we are fine with what you know as well.
I guess what is hard for us ‘oldies’ us being able to manage what the teenagers tell us without saying something like “you didn’t invent love” or “you didn’t invent a little law-breaking”etc etc. They don’t want to hear that. What I have found they do want to hear is what I did as a teenager. Not that I did the same as them. They seem to want to hear that I had a life, not just claim I did. For this reason I need to get into doing something I have put off too long.
I need to reconnect with my first friends. The ones I grew up with. The ones that know me. They can help me Maybe relating to my kids is not about being young myself, but opening up about what being young looked like to me. They can make their own minds up if it is something they relate to.
And, now what? 