This post is sponsored by Nuffnang.
***
Just let me do it myself! she exclaims, holding the mouse like a hostage.
I wasn’t trying to take the mouse off her, but she is impatient and frustrating and she assumes that that is what I was going to do, because that’s what I did when I was 10 and teaching her how to navigate a computer for the first time.
Okay, let me talk you through it. Click on the email icon.
Where is the email icon?
In the start menu.
Slowly she navigates to the start menu, me sitting at an opposite desk.
Where is it? I can’t see it.
I click through on my computer and look.
There, at the top.
Her frustration rises and so does mine. This is the most annoying thing I’ve ever had to do and she just won’t listen. She’s like a toddler, yelling I can do it my OWN self, and I just want to calmly state that yes, of course you can, but geez, you need to listen to me talk you through it!
This was how it started, all of it. When I started college, my mother came with me as a mature age student. She’d been wanting to go back to school for a while and I’d been nagging her. Finally, it paid off and there we were, on opposite sides of a desk in the library, glaring at each other.
Never mind, she snapped. I’ll get S to show me later.
I can show you now Mum, you just need to listen!
I stood up, to stand behind her.
Veronica! She growled. I can do it myself! Don’t take the mouse off me!
Again, it was like a hostage situation.
I wasn’t going to take the mouse. I was going to point to where you needed to click.
ARGHHHH!
Eventually, we decided that instead of killing each other, we would let S show her how her email worked. S did, and Mum wasn’t worried about having the mouse wrestled from her grip. Not that I was going to anyway.
(And not that I did, although she claims otherwise, I maintain that her memory is flawed by the fear of having the mouse taken off her. I might have had to sit on my hands an awful lot, but I didn’t take that damn mouse away.)
5 years later and while she will still ring me up to get me to talk her through something tricky, Mum is pretty much a computer expert. When I started this blog, I nagged her into starting one of her own. Over 2 years later, her blog is still going strong. In fact, she was one of the finalists for Best Australian/NZ Weblog 2010.
I don’t think she’s ever gotten over the fear of having me take the mouse away though.
***
It seems we were ahead of our time, with computers and blogging. I was teaching Mum how to use a computer 10 years ago and we nearly killed each other.
Nowadays, there are things like The Digital Mums Campaign: helping to teach mothers how to use email, the Internet and social networking to keep in touch with their children in today’s online world.
I would have killed for something like that, it wouldn’t have gotten me sent to my room nearly as often! Mum and I might be ahead of the times, but I’m pretty sure other mothers are still sitting in front of their computers, holding a mouse hostage and telling their children to just let me work it out myself!
The Digital Mums Campaign is active over on Facebook and they talk about mothers, social networking and keeping in touch. I wonder if you’d like to click over and become a fan? You can probably find me over there, talking about my mother who has managed to outshine me in the digital world this year!
