Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Ninety-Three Texts

My son got ninety-three texts last night from three people. His phone was sitting on the end table by the couch and kept vibrating against the wood until I picked it up to see what its problem was. It was the three kids who regularly clog his messages.

lmfao, im so fkd.

lol!!!!! y? yr mom?

gtg, cu.

What language is this? No generation has made so many changes in one decade to our language than this group of teens and twenty-somethings. I don't even understand it anymore and have to look stuff up to snoop.

I guess that's the point. It's like they're a bunch of DaVincis who are afraid they'll be killed if the work is discovered and they spend their wee hours typing into small computers instead of writing backward in their journals.

Funny thing was that in those ninety-three indecipherable texts, they didn't say much, let alone much that was offensive.

I reserve the right to read texts on my kid's phone. So sue me. He's fifteen and still vulnerable to bullying, though their worst insult was that he'd gone to the dark side and become popular. When I asked him about it, he nodded and said that a lot of the football kids were popular and he wasn't going to dis them because of it. I asked about the girl who'd leveled the accusation and he said she put her head down in the halls and didn't look at him any more.

Ah, I understand this one. There was a group of four of them last year, two gregarious and two quiet. The two gregarious ones moved away in the spring and now the two quiet ones are left, a boy and a girl. Awkward! If they like-like each other, neither of them has the courage to admit it. If they don't and they're just friends, the noisy part of their crew, the people that dragged them together in the first place, are missing and nothing requires them to make eye contact in the halls. When I asked Nick if he was still friendly with her, he said yes, but we were in the car so I couldn't tell in his answer if there was any of that nuance that would have told me he like-liked her. He holds that crush very close to the belt.

One day when I brought food for him while he was supposed to be studying, he slammed a year book into his chest and gripped it so I couldn't see any photos therein until I went away. As if I'd be able to figure it out based on thirty pictures in a book. Well, maybe I could have. Poor boy. I snoop openly to protect him, but my curiosity is killing me about the girl. It sucks when you're a teenager and your parents are curious about your life. It does.

At least I'm honest about it. I told him I snooped among his texts because I was worried what they were saying about him. It wasn't too surprising, so I'll let it go for a month or two.

I still won't know about the girl by then. He'll come to it, being ready to show his feelings, in his own time.

In the meantime, that new language. It sucks. I hope it doesn't stick.

Thank you for listening, jules

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