Ssshhhh….your typing is too loud
I pretty much knew the question was coming.
I noticed I was doing it.
I knew he was in the room. It was inevitable.
“Why do you do that?” my husband asked from across the room.
“Do what?” I asked, if I didn’t know what he was referring to. “Twiddle your thumbs,” he said. I had no outright answer for him. I’m just a thumb twiddler. Well, me and my dad. When I lay down on the couch watching TV, I often twiddle my thumbs. It just comes naturally. My dad does it quite often too and over the years I’ve always felt it was a trait I inherited from him.
It got me to thinking later that night, am I more like my dad or my mom?
Do I do more of what he does, or what she does?
I can remember being a kid and watching in disgust as my dad would open a can of soup or something – or take any food that I felt required heating – and he would eat it cold. Yuck.
Oddly enough (albeit, not with soup) I find myself in my later years not always caring if what I eat is hot or cold. Things that I would take out of the fridge and automatically pop into the microwave I don’t always bother heating up anymore. I guess that makes me like dad.
My mom on the other hand (and I know for a fact she is part of a club that numbers millions, if not billions), always wanted me to check in when I was driving somewhere, particularly if it is a long distance. And because I’m a mom and the definition of mom includes: ‘a person who worries forever’ I do the same to my kids – and even kids that aren’t mine. Heck, even other adults.
“Text me when you get there,” I’ll often say.
Recently my youngest son was going to a friend’s house and then they were going to another friend’s house so I started drilling him on how they were going to be getting from Point A to Point B, at which point he told me, “Mom, I’m 15,” to which I responded, “Your brother is almost 20 and I just had the same conversation with him half an hour ago.”
And I’m 48 and I’m sure I’ve probably had to let my mother know my travel plans to somewhere in the past few weeks.
In other words, live with it – I’m not only like my mom, I am a mom. And there is no expiry date on concern.
Sometimes I wonder if my kids are more like me or more like their dad. At the same time I’ve come to accept the fact that neither ever wants to follow in my journalistic footsteps. I guess that’s to be expected when I used to drag them to assignments or we’d stop into the newsroom for “just 10 minutes” and would only end up leaving two hours later.
Plus they see me work very long hours. Already today I’ve put in almost 11 hours.
One night last week my son Justin and I were sitting at opposite ends of the kitchen table. He was working on school work. I was typing stories on my laptop.
After commenting on how fast he says I can type in comparison to him, he then complained that my typing was too loud and it was distracting him.
(He should be thankful he wasn’t around back in the typewriter days.)
I looked at him a little dumbfounded considering that here is a kid that sometimes plugs in headphones and listens to music as he’s working. And I told him as much.
“I hardly think my typing is too loud,” I said.
His response?
“It’s literally a pet peeve to me. I heard it all my childhood and it’s scarred me for life.”
Hmmm…I guess that takes him out of the ‘I’m like mom’ category.