My mom is a Facebook Mom, but definitely not one of those Facebook Moms who posts minion, Monday, or wine memes – that is, if you can call them that. Those are a completely different breed.
See, my mom lurks. Not as if she's ever looking for anything, but for as often as I see her "Active," she leaves little to no trace of an online presence. I love and hate to expose her like this, but she just scrolls. Doesn't post. Doesn't interact. Keeps utilization of the platform's literal purpose – to connect – to the barest of minimums, if none at all.
And I know what you're thinking: Facebook is dead and has been for some time. But, listen, this is how she's always navigated it.
As you can likely tell from my dissection of such a trivial matter, the whole thing's pretty comical to me. I'll poke fun at her for it from time to time and she reassures me she's all caught up on who's where and what's when.
But, the way that I can laugh about such things and simultaneously experience a weird sort of self-deprecation in doing so has been utterly confusing to me. Picking on my mom, in a way, has always mimicked picking on myself, to which I came to a startling conclusion:
"Oh God, I'm turning into my mom."
This trope has felt familiar to me before I noticed how apparent it was in my own life. I'm almost certain every 20-something woman has the same sudden and horrid realization with the same exact phrasing. It's been milked in media, from sitcoms to those crappy chick flicks that are still fun to watch and probably to even an episode of "Sex and the City." I mean, you've heard almost everyone one of your older friends, your aunts, and even your sister say it.
It was only a matter of time before it spread to me too.
Back to what triggered this realization in the first place – once I realized that I had picked up this habit of being a "bystander," if you will, it made me overly aware of how often I've been doing it.
Maybe it's because I'm in more group chats than I can count on both hands, but I am almost virtually silent in most of them. Sure, the dynamic will change within each and every chat, tweaking my comfortability with contributing to the conversation in the first place, with what frequency, and in what tone. These are things I could dissect and they would really only be indicative of my relationship with each member, but I've chosen to keep my eye on this general trend: staying relatively withdrawn. Yes, I see everything. Sometimes I just feel like keeping my two-cents. And with this parallel drawn, I stopped interpreting my mom's Facebook scrolling as a bad thing, even if it was only ever in a kidding way.
As for keeping to myself, maybe it's a learned trait considering I wasn't always so withdrawn. Perhaps its a virtual manifestation of my newfound introversion. Maybe it's genetic. Or maybe – actually probably – I'm just reading way too into things.
Whatever the case may be, this similarity of many between my mother and me helped me to understand both of us a little better. Why she does the things she does. Why I am the way I am.
Association with my mother in this way, even something this insignificant in our lives, makes me appreciate the good things she has passed on to me.
Creativity. Patience. Compassion. So, you know what? I am turning into my mom, and I'm pretty damn happy about it.
