Late night friends...

The beauty of being a single parent is that your adult social life can very well begin and end when your children are asleep. Our day time social life generally revolves around the children's activities - school drop off, after school sports, a play at the park, etc. But our adult life comes out after dark... and we don't even have to leave home!

We don't feel so isolated anymore due to the various ways we can communicate thanks to the mobile phone, the internet, internet dating, Skype and the various social media that offer 'chat.' We can have friends abroad, next door, over the street, in another state, wherever they maybe, and we can generally now communicate endlessly for free with them. Friends can see when you're available on Facebook or Skype if both of you are struggling to sleep into the wee hours. You feel safe knowing that someone you can depend on is just a click away...

I think there was a stigma when social media came out that people would become less social, be less able to deal with face to face communication and become hermits within their own space. But from my experience, communication is becoming more open. Let's talk about video chatting... People are less afraid of saying what they really feel because you can quickly end a conversation by hanging up, you can confront someone face to face through video chat without worrying about getting physically abused. People are actually talking, because they are actually being engaged by the person they are talking to - they see that their facial expressions are genuine, they see the hand gestures and they can see that they are not being distracted by outside influences... they are making the effort to listen.

Written chat maintains the same concentration level as you need to decipher what was written first to which response and respond quickly. You can have two conversations at once - the one your friend wants to get out, and the one you want to get out, and somehow each of you know which part of the conversation refers to theirs or yours. I've had some amazing conversations through chat with long lost friends where we have just picked up in our casual banter from twenty years ago and become life long friends again...

And then there is the old fashioned phone... the one mum tends to pick up and say hello on for an hour at a time. The beauty of all these conversations is that you have the space, time and silence to actually enjoy the conversations without being distracted by little people wanting your attention. It's your time... your very precious time... to be YOU!!