We send and receive hundreds, maybe thousands, of texts a week, right? I bet, like me, you take most of them for granted. These days, I’m teaching myself not to. Smiley faces may have been replaced with emoji, but at their core, texts are really kitchen table notes.
Do you remember getting notes from Mom? I sure do. Growing up in a family with two busy parents, it was an easy way for us to communicate. The notes were usually written in a half-used notebook left over from the previous school year. We used scrap paper because of course, crunchy family that we were, we recycled before it was a “thing”.
The notes were about when to expect someone home, when we needed to be home, where we were going, where they would be, how to reach people, and most often, who called for us. If we had saved those notebooks, we’d have a memoir of our family nearly written and half ready to publish.
Each note gave a little glimpse of their personalities. My dad signed his notes with a single, capital ‘G’ scribbled in cursive. My mom signed hers with ‘Mom’ and a smiley face, each note written in their respective and entirely different handwriting. Mom’s impeccable nurse’s handwriting was peppered with nursing shorthand. My dad’s nearly illegible writing was written with a “fancy” refillable pen that flowed over the page with ease.
My younger brother and I were clueless then. The notes probably seemed annoying to us. Of course, I didn’t see them as love notes at the time. As a parent, I see them in a new way. I should have cherished each note my parents wrote to us, these little notes, each one letting us know they cared. Now that I send my own texts and leave sticky notes for our middle schooler, I see each of my parents’ notes showed how much they cared.
My parents still use these notes, still reuse notebooks (how many castoff notebooks did we leave behind??). And when P was a baby, my husband and I used a notebook to communicate diaper changes, feedings, BMs, and naps as we played tag between jobs and caring for our son. We still leave paper notes for each other once in a while, but more and more we send our “notes” by phone.
At thirteen years old, our son “writes” texts that make me crazy with zero capitalization or punctuation, and clearly communicate he’s *barely* tolerating me and my embarrassing messages of love. But I don’t care. Some rare days we hit our texting stride just right and have a gif war of sorts, communicating entirely in gifs. Each gif gets more and more ridiculous until we’re both sure there’s no way the other can find a gif to reply with, I’m giggling out loud (GOL), about to wet my pants, and my heart is bursting with love for the human I made.
Notes (and texts) are easy to take for granted, easy to dismiss as routine. But love is in the routine. The things we do for each other over and over and over. Now, once pencil-drawn smiley faces are emoji on a screen, and jokes are conveyed with gifs instead of words scribbled with the nub of a pencil, but the message remains the same, “I love you.”
Grown or still growing, how do you connect with your kiddos?
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