Showing My Age

A few weeks ago I was driving the car with all of the kids to pick up an additional kid at a friend’s house and deliver all the kids to church for youth group and AWANA.  (While the kids are at church the grown ups have Bible study).  It’s always rushed leaving our house to get to AWANA, and the kids are always hyper and noisy.  Since I am a single tasker, I don’t handle noise while I’m driving.  I don’t handle anything well while I’m driving because the truth of the matter is I’ve always been a bad driver, and I always will be.   I remembered when I was going down the street that everyone was quieter when music was playing.  Ordinarily I don’t have music on in the car when I’m driving in town because even that is too distracting for me as a driver.  I asked Mr. SP, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, if he would fiddle around with the buttons and turn on The Banana’s violin CD.

Because I don’t have the music on in the car very often, I don’t know what all the buttons do.  I can figure it out, of course, but I have to stop and think about it and I can’t do that when I’m driving, so that means I have to stop and park the car to get the job done.  I know this seems ridiculous to most people, but it is what it is.  I can’t drive and mess with the radio.  It just doesn’t work for me.

Mr. SP apparently didn’t realize this about me, however, and was instantly angry that I asked him to get things started on the stereo.  Somehow he thought I was insulting him.  “I’m TEN years old, and you think I can’t run a CAR STEREO!!!!!”  I was so surprised by the rage!  I stopped and said, “I’m 38 and I don’t really know how to run that car stereo.”

That totally made him erupt in to a FIT of laughter.  “You are REALLY getting old, Mom, if you don’t know how to run the car stereo.”

And it’s true.  All of the sudden I felt like an old person, like my grandparents who could never figure out the buttons on their television remote.  I was out of touch with technology.  Officially middle aged.  On my way out.

AND THEN, last week I bought YaYa an iPod shuffle for a very early birthday present. She is working hard on learning a Bach oboe concerto and needed to be able to listen to recordings in a variety of locations.  Plus she’s a teenager, so I thought it was reasonable that she might like her own music playing device.   Access to screens is currently very tightly controlled in our house for a number of reasons, and an iPod touch or nano was out of my budget for birthday gifts anyway.  Truth be told she didn’t want an iPod that did a lot of things anyway, so the shuffle it was.

I bought the shuffle at Target, and spent a swath of my free time last Friday loading music and playlists onto it, and figuring out how to run that little tiny square.  Since there is no screen, I had to figure out how the voice over worked and how to get from one playlist to the next.  I had previously owned nanos and I currently use an iPod touch, but I’d never worked with a shuffle before.  It took a while.

She came home from school and I was excited to give her the ipod and show her how it worked.  I started explaining the buttons and the voice over, and numerous times she said, “OK, Mom.”  Something wasn’t working, and I was trying to figure it out, and finally she let all her exasperation out and said, “MOM, I know how to run it!”

Sure enough, she did.  Even though I didn’t.

And here I thought I was helping her!

This is all to say that even though I’ve grown up with computers and cell phones, and use electronical devices as tools all day long, I am apparently already out of touch.  Even though I can eventually figure out how something works, apparently my kids can do it all much, much faster.

Pretty soon they will be smarter than me as well.  But maybe I’ll still be wiser.