Family Visits that are not visits

For a couple months my wife and I have been looking forward to a summer visit from our grandson and grand daughter. Various conversations suggested perhaps a couple weeks. The relation between grandma and grand daughter is very close and they have similar interests in clothing, sewing, cooking, and (currently undesirable) feminine activites. These grand children are junior and senior high school age. The girl is sophisticated, lovely and worldly, having spent time in England in school, and anticipates two years school in Rome. The boy is a more typical American high school senior.

The final visit arrangements were made, but to our grief were to be only 5 days. In addition, the visit was to include the grandson’s girl friend. This was a surprise, for not more than two weeks prior, they had “broken up”. Still, we welcomed the chance to strenghten bonds and learn more about them as they mature, especially after a year of little contact.

Greeting our progengy was wonderful, with hugs, smiles, joint declarations of love given with appropriate declenations to the girl friend, who is indeed a lovely young lady and welome for the visit. Each of these being raised in the south, responding with “yes maam” and “yes sir” to most questions and comments. So sad the “north” has lost this part of bringing up.

The sadness I have for our visit, not yet over, is that so much time is spent with them, and to a lesser degree us, with faces plastered against iphones, ipads, etc. Lunch today was striking to me. At least we had lunch together. Often meals when we would visit in the past in their own home would be individuals grabbing what they felt interesting at the time and then moving off to their own world. Today, everyone sat at a table and (hopefully) enjoyed cold cut sandwiches, fruit, beverage. However, each had a device at their plate. (Tooting my own horn, I didn’t). I tried to make conversation with grand daughter about a book she was reading. That lasted a couple minutes. The wondeful lady of the house was engrossed in a sewing web page. Grandson and girlfriend were in the midst of their e-devices, perhaps playing a game as a team with others on-line. Meal over. Clean up. Youth folk walking off to a local elementary school where “Daddy” attended to ride the swings. Grandma back in her sewing room, proparing and hoping to involve grand daughter in a project before they leave. Grandpa back in his library bitching about life.

My worry is that although our family is actually pretty close, we love each other and really do know about the lives of each, we have lost the ability to easily comunicate as once was present in people. I personally find it harder to have a conversation with someone although during my working life being able to communicate was the basis of it. We complain that the “social media” is impairing communication of political, social, etc. views but I think social media is destroying our ability to physically relate to other people, even those we most love. I must say that the family engaged, and is still engaged in playing Monopoly (day two), and during those times there was active person to person communication and emotional contact of a good kind. Joking, benign arguing, all those kinds of interaction. Leaving the board game changed everything into the e-life of what I have been concerned.

So, what to do? I am guilty as is the love of my life for having an e-life that we entered when seeing the youth in theirs. We should have locked up our devices and tried to kidnap them from theirs. How to do it? I don’t know. I do think that Facebook, Twitter, and similar sites are destroying us slowly, actually taking human contact and turning it into digits. As people we are losing a part of our humanity.