Girlz Art Day and Wayz to Communicate

Utterly and completely fascinated these days with all modes of communication -- from works of art right down to tweets.  Inviting you to take a little blog stroll with me through yesterday's Girlz Art Day to explore these themes . . . .

This is what fabulous daughter Meryl began painting -- going to be a set of four of them, in the patterns on some her wonderful hand-painted converse, to hang in her home office.

Lesson #1:  we love to communicate through art.  What do you think she's saying with all of those happy circles?  

But before we girlz got down to communicating through art, Meryl and fabulous soon-to-be-daughter-in-law Christine did a bit of consulting about bridesmaid dresses for the upcoming wedding.  (That's right.  I'm going to be a mother-in-law.)

To those of us Of A Certain Age:  what is amazing about this?  Right.  This is not shopping together at the Bridesmaids-R-Us store.  Nope.  This is two busy young women looking at a laptop screen together where they pull up photos stored in the "bridesmaid dresses" file.  

Lesson #2:  you can communicate by looking together at the same screen.

And this is no-nonsense-and-yet-still-fabulous son Adam, who rode along for Girlz Art Day and brought his tax work to do upstairs while we played downstairs.

Lesson #3:  best way to communicate with 28-year-old son (and soon to be husband of Christine) is via text messaging.

Downstairs in the art room, we girlz worked on our projects while listening to excellent jams provided by Meryl, and in alternating bursts of talk and then sweet, concentrated silence.

And, after hours of this . . . I had to kick the girlz out so I could move on to other, cranky-making tasks which I needed to thrash out in solitude.   And I felt terrible about being such a timing-meanie.  

Lesson #4:  while it is super quick and easy and efficient -- and even silly and fun -- to communicate in our various on-line lanes, there just is no real substitute for being together.  For hanging out and eating chocolate and Brie, and drinking great coffee, and for working on art projects in the same space.  For going upstairs to say hi to the boy/man working on his taxes, who sneaks crackers to the dog who looks adoringly at him - the only other being on the planet who understands her love of food that completely.  

Lesson #5:  that said, my knee-jerk reluctance to engage in burgeoning forms of communication as they erupted was ill-founded.  What is wrong with finding the forms of communication that different people feel most comfortable with?  A text is what Adam likes.  An e-mail works great with my husband during work days.  New friends on Twitter use those 140-character spaces to come up with lots of humor and support.  And I never knew how much I would love to blog, until I tried it.  

Lesson #6:  More art.  More communication.  More ways of doing so.  The world needs you to put yourself out there, for all of us to hear and see.  Don't be afraid.  It rocks.