When I sent my daughter off for her first day of high school I expected her to come home with tales of being froshed, and a list of school supplies she needed which I had neglected to get.
What I didn't expect was for her to walk through the door on her first day of school, walk over to my computer and pull up my twitter page.
"Mom, I need a twitter account."
Well why don't you just cut my heart out with a rusty spoon instead? It would be far less painful and likely less traumatic.
It turns out; some of her teachers are using that new-fangled twitter thang as a way to help further their outreach with students. And there is a social media component to one of her classes.
It all sounds a tad new-agey to me and quite frankly I miss the days of slate and chalk.
You see I'm a firm believer of separation between church and state. I think this is a good rule. I apply it to many aspects of my life, from the trivial 'the peas must never touch the gravy' to
my husband should never know what Facebook is, let alone use it.
Twitter is my last bastion of privacy. And by privacy, I mean, it's the one place I can publicly discuss my chin whiskers and how I'm so lazy I'd prefer to let the dogs lick the plates clean instead of loading them into our dishwasher.
No one reads
my twitter stream. I mean, no one that I know
offline. My husband tried keeping up with my tweets but it turned out, I talk too much on twitter and since I regularly chatter his ear off in real life he didn't have the space in his head to make room for my twitter inanity. I've never loved him more than the day he swore off twitter.
Other than one cousin on my husband's side, there are no family members on twitter. There are a handful of people I know offline who use twitter and quite frankly, I like this. Twitter is
my space. I don't want to share it with people I can run into at the grocery store.
How on earth can I mock life in general if I will be held accountable for my tweets?
Isn't it enough that I willingly friended both my mother and my mother-in-law on Facebook? I all but axed my personal Facebook page so that my children could have a sliver of online privacy when they started their own Facebook profiles.
I can't share twitter space with my child. I'd have to
filter. I filter here on the blog (shush up, I do!) I don't want to filter on twitter. I want to talk about dead chickens and Sarah Palin and write odes to Nickelback on twitter.
My daughter, after listening to me rant as my head exploded, looked at me and calmly replied, "Not everything is about you, you know."
Touché.
"You just don't want me to tell people you aren't really all that cool."
Oh sweetie. Everyone who reads me already knows this. They love me anyways.
So we're at an impasse. I don't want her on twitter, not even with a locked profile, and she thinks I'm hogging the Internet.
Which I am.
I freely admit this.
But I'm clueless as to how to navigate social media while raising teens that are going to need to learn to be social media savvy when they grow up.
Maybe the problem is, I'm not ready for them to grow up, read my tweet stream and kill any last thread of mommy magic I've spun for them.
Maybe the problem is,
I'm not ready to grow up just yet. I've obviously never learned to share.
High school. It's only just begun and already it's one giant fail whale.
*Opinions are welcome. Whose side are YOU on?
