Cruel geography

My Dear Daughter has written about Anti-Social Media. It came at a time when I have been missing her, and my other children. It comes at a time when I am too aware of the distance between us.

Dear Daughter wrote that the easy "connections" of the various and sundry social media of the digital age do not bring us together, but can be keeping us apart, keeping us separate, keeping our relationships surface only.

This is one version of the response I wrote to her:
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When I first saw this posting a week ago I put it aside before responding because the truth you write is too raw and painful for me at times. The intimacy promised by facile social media is a false intimacy. It would be nice to think that geography is irrelevant in a high tech age, but geography is still cruelly relevant. We delude ourselves that we are "close" but we are not close. We are miles and miles apart.

No matter the timely tweet, the cryptic post on Facebook or the blatant blog rant, meaning is lost, connection fails. More can be read from the nuances of a sigh, the hesitation before the word, the glance held, the glance dropped.

And a virtual hug is virtually nothing at all.

There is so much more to be said, but I will wait to say it with wine or coffee shared, in the same place, at the same moment.


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That was the comment I left.

I mourn the distance between each of my children and myself; and I recognize with pain that the distance is not only the miles of cruel geography, but also the span between sorrow and comfort, between experience and sharing. Between surface and depth. Between knowing you and losing you.