Communication in my family is done via various methods that are common today. And because those various methods are scattered and different for almost each person communication is hard.
My wife uses Facebook messenger to text. And so I may get a message from her on Facebook messenger, via text, she may grab email in the middle of a conversation and send an email about something, and for a while we tried Snapchat but that didn't work out very well. She will post things on Facebook and tag me in and expect me to catch it. And sometimes she'll leave me a written no that I'm supposed to catch as a flyby the table doing my thing.
My assignments in college informed me that I don't check the email account that I've used almost all of my life very much anymore, I use this other one now that you never sent email to but that's where I'm looking. My youngest son is all over the map and uses multiple things including the flip phone that we provide for him. My oldest son uses his work email and his phone for texting for the most part, and my daughter and son-in-law both use different methods of communication at different times.
With all of these methods of communication things still fall through the cracks. They will tell their mothers something expecting me to know it next time they talk to me. My mother will do that and expect me to know things and get upset when I don't know them. And what's hard for me is that I will get upset because they're operating as if I already know certain things and I have no idea about anything that they're talking about most of the time.
One of the most egregious examples for my life is when I was talking to my what mother one afternoon on the phone and she was talking about how wonderful it was what my brother and his wife were doing with their newborn son. And how I must feel so honored about what they had done. And I had to finally ask her what the hell you talking about? And she said the deed named him and made his middle name your name after you. This had not been shared with me at all. This is not been told to me by them, by my wife who knew and had known for several weeks, nor anybody else in the family. Surgeries have been that way, where people will tell my wife and then expect me to know it because they told my wife.
So I came up with a simple formula that I share with my family members: telling her does not equal telling me.
People laugh when I share that formula with them but it's true! And it's easy. And it keeps people out of trouble and keeps assumptions at a lower level.
Communication is fun! It's a lot more fun when it actually happens.
