Facebook 101

When I'm on Facebook, I get the feeling I'm being immersed in a different culture. I'm not multi-lingual enough to have much Facebook experience in anything other than English, but it seems that no matter which English-speaking country its "friends" are from, Facebook has a way of of corralling everyone into certain protocols, language patterns, and forms of address. In other words, it messes with the ways we might otherwise interact.

Facebook allows users to reply to one another, and when you tap "reply," to respond to someone's comment, Facebook auto-fills the other person's name. As a stickler for punctuation, I often take the extra two seconds required to insert a comma after the name before typing my reply. If I don't do that, I am nagged by the notion that I have just contributed to the breakdown of written language in Western civilization. I think Facebook should include the comma in the auto-fill so I no longer have to take time out of a busy day to either add the comma or contemplate the damage caused when I left it out. 

Many of us also use our middle names, maiden names, married names, and hyphenates of all of the above when on Facebook. This can cause a stilted lilt in our Facebook conversations. Consider:

A woman posts a picture of herself with a trendy short haircut. Such photos are usually selfies taken in the poster's car immediately after leaving the salon. One of her Facebook friends comments that the haircut has a "cute little David Cassidy vibe going on." The woman fires back with, "Emma Jane Zelinski-Masterson-Whalberg, you think I look like a guy?!?"

In its ongoing effort to clarify users' communications even further, Facebook offers a collection of emojis for reacting to a post. The options are a thumbs up, a heart, a laughing face, an awestruck face, a crying face, and a scowl-y, angry face. Facebook used to offer only the thumbs up, aka the "like" button, but broadened the choices when users found it off-putting to "like" their friends' heart-wrenching posts about the death of a beloved pet and the other kinds of heartbreaks we all endure in life. 

That just made me think of something else. Say one of my Facebook friends goes skiing at a luxury resort in the Swiss Alps. He breaks his foot and posts a picture of his bruised-up toes peeking from a cast. His post says he'll have to spend the next ten days recuperating in front of a roaring fire while drinking brandy. If I tap the heart to send my love, will people think I'm happy about the broken foot? Probably not.

But how will they know for sure?  

Defending Facebook: My "Charmed" Life

If Facebook gets you down, makes you feel your relationships, your family, your furniture, your holidays don't quite measure up, or if you think everyone on there is a shallow bunch of fakers, please understand: You aren't privy to everybody's backstory. 

On one of many road trips back to see my mother. 
Photo copyright, Teece Aronin

I post pictures of my kids baking cookies as the dog watches with flour on her face. I make sure you wake to photos of my cat, stretched in feline repose across my bed. I choose pictures that show most cheerfully or poignantly or humorously how well my kids and I get along.

What you don't see is everything that came before, like a tsunami crushing our lives. Life fell apart, and what you see on Facebook is the repair work, the reassembly, the cleanup - with me, the mother, who never knew a damned thing about how to do any of this - as team captain by default.

There was the end of a marriage to the man who fathered these children, who helped build a home only the most tangled of crossed stars could destroy and did. There was me scrambling to find a better job before our house sold out from under us. There was me networking in two different states, first the kids' home state and next mine, to find that job. 

There was the kids having to leave their father. There was the kids having to leave their grandmother. There was me having to leave my mother when I'd always planned to be there as she aged. There was the night before we left when she broke the "no open flame" rule at her assisted living facility, lit a votive, and joined hands with us around the flame. Then she spoke with a smile of how grateful she was that we had been near her all those years and how she would pray for our trip to be safe.

Then there was the 500-mile move away from every warm thing my kids had ever known.

There were the months on end where I swore I was piloting the kids through hell only to learn that they were guiding me. There were the endless kindnesses of family and friends who took us in, shored us up, and gave us hope.

There was Facebook, which became a way to document the restoration. The place I laid our trips to cider mills and pickle festivals and county fairs as though they were flowers and Facebook was an altar. 

It was a place where the Facebook friends who truly knew me tracked our progress and supported the effort, and where those whose newsfeed I clogged, viewed the work, neither knowing nor caring that there was any work in it.

It was the place I showed off my new sofa with framed Rothko prints hung perfectly level right above - and where at least five nail holes hid behind each print even though I measured. It was a place where few knew it took five years to save the money for that sofa because I was terrified of credit card debt. It was somewhere just a handful of people were aware that the sofa's predecessor had belonged to my aunt, was chewed up by our dog, and that the prints came from a thrift shop and cost $12 each.

I, who loved to write and aspired to be a blogger, developed my "voice" on Facebook, found rhythms for my words, and learned how good it felt when my posts made people laugh. It was a place where my friends nurtured the writer sapling until it was strong enough to launch that blog. 

Anyone who didn't know me well might have thought: 'What a great little family; I wonder what happened to the marriage.'

For the record, the marriage was lost in the tsunami.

But I had Facebook where I documented our trips to see my mother and my ex-husband, where friends could see how well he and I worked together for the sake of our children, and everyone could wonder just how much was exactly as it seemed.