Never Again

I think I'm glad that I never have to be 17 again.
Never again  have to go through the agony and the ecstasy, the soul- searching and the confusion and most of all never again have to deal with hormones raging in uncontrollable  waves through my body.
At 17 the world oscillates from hope to despair, from laughter to tears, from unlimited possibilities to utter boredom at a break-neck speed.
It's exhausting to watch, let alone experience.
And worst of all, is the searching for love.
Fun as it is flirting your way towards Mr ( or Mrs ) Right, the emotional and mental games we play with each other are painful and often unnecessarily mean.
Everyone is too scared to say how they really feel and too frightened to risk the pain of rejection and heartbreak.
So instead we pretend that no one really matters.
Why do we do it to each other?  
Why, when we are young, is it so hard to tell someone you care, to say " I like you, let's try each other out and see what happens next."
Is it so hard to admit that you want someone standing next to you while you take your first steps into adulthood?
So hard to say " come walk and talk with me a while?"
So hard to share each other's dreams?
Meeting up, just the two of you, is rare in this social- media, risk averse age.
 Instead of spending time together, relationships are lived out through texts and Snapchats with the occasional coupling at drunken parties.
" How horrible," says my friend when I talk to her about it.  " How sad not to date anymore, not to look into a boy's eyes and feel your stomach flipping over."
And she's right, how sad and how horrible.
" You don't understand," says our 17 year old daughter "  that's not how it works.."
" Then how does it work?" I wonder.
How will you ever get to know each other, if you never talk?
How will you ever begin to fall in love if you never sit opposite each other and sense the warmth of a smile or feel the shiver of a touch? 
How will you ever share the tears and laughter that make life worth living?
And how will you ever learn what it means to really be there for someone else?
I'm not sure that writing LOL or Hahaha in a text or ending a message with a sad faced emoji, are quite the same thing.

" In my day," I tell our daughter, " we didn't have mobile phones.  If a boy asked for your number, you had to spend days hanging around at home just in case he phoned.  And you couldn't even move far from the room with the phone in because the phone was attached to the wall."
She looks at me, horrified.
" But what if the phone rang  and somebody else answered it?"
" Well," I explain, "  they would say hello and maybe chat for a bit and then come and get me and tell me someone was on the phone for me.."
" How embarrassing," she says.
Was it embarrassing?
 I try to remember.
Was it so terrible that my parents and brother and sister recognised the voices of some of my friends and every now and again managed a short conversation with them?
Was it so terrible that teenagers sometimes had to talk adults?
Was it so terrible that our lives weren't separated by the shimmeringly impassable wall of  a cyber-bubble?.
The strange thing about social networking is that it makes everything in your life more public and everything that you actually feel more private.
But maybe that's the point.
What's scary is the personal, 
Being impersonal and flippant is what keeps your heart safe.
What's important in a text is not what is actually being said but how good your comebacks are.
What's important when you snapchat is not the words but how best to capture the moment with an image showing your best side.
There's no quiet place to sit and talk in the social media universe.
No end to the constant stream of trivial information that can fill a quiet moment.
No time to sit and wonder how you really feel-the next text could arrive at any moment.
Was it so awful to have hours each day when you couldn't communicate with each other and instead daydreamed about the things you would say the next time you spoke.
It's strange, but the year that my husband, Ninesh, and I, spent apart, he in America and me in England, is probably the year that we talked the most.
All we had were our phone calls.
We talked about everything and nothing, about how we felt about each other and what we had for breakfast, about politics and partying, about work and love.
" Talking to each other is really important," I say to our kids.
Our two teenagers sigh and for just a moment raise their eyes from their screens to give me a sympathetic look. 
" We are talking mum," they say, " what do you think texting is. We're talking to everyone all the time."
" But what about talking to just one person some of the time?" I ask. " And how do you know what someone is really thinking if you can't see or hear them?"
" You have to stop asking so many questions mum." they say, fingers flying across their phone keys. " We're just teenagers and this is what we do.  Stop making everything such a big deal."
And unwillingly I have to admit, they have a point.. 
I need to stop living my life vicariously.
I need to stop feeling that they are missing out on something. 
Because I think perhaps the truth is, that it is me who is missing out.
That perhaps  what makes me sad is that as a curious parent wanting to be over-involved in my children's social-life, their texting, snap-chatting universe excludes me.
" I'm writing a blog about being 17" I say, walking into the living room where our daughter and her friends are huddled together on the sofa under a duvet, passing around phones to make sure no message or image is missed.
" Cool," they say, " can you take a photo of us so we can be in it? It's about us, right?"
And that's when I remember the good part about being 17.
The part where the world revolves around you, where " right now," is all that matters and where you can eat as much chocolate and ice cream as you want. 
" Good idea," I say "Remind me how to take a photo with my phone."

Ollie, Charlie and Mia

And they are compassionately patient as they explain yet again what buttons I need to press.
And I don't think it's that I can't learn, I think it is that with every bone in my body I resist it.
Perhaps they are right, our teenagers, that just like my parents before me,  I don't understand how modern relationships work.
And sometimes it's cold out here in the land of yesteryear where phones were attached to walls and the only way to communicate was by talking.
But I can't help remembering that heart-melting feeling when you stared into the eyes of someone you cared about and, reaching out to each other, walked hand-in-hand into the perfectly setting sun.