OMG My Mother Is ON FACEBOOK!

I HAVE reached a curious point in life. Although I feel like the same precocious know-it-all cynic I always was, I suddenly am surrounded by younger precocious know-it-all cynics whose main purpose appears to be to remind me that I’ve lost my edge.

Hadley Hooper

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Many of these people are teenagers.
Some of them I gave birth to.
One was in a breech position.
And the other day, as I drove home with one of my tormenters in the passenger seat, she started laughing at the way I pronounced “Henri Cartier-Bresson.”
“Ha ha ha, is that how you think his name sounds?” my daughter said. “Oh, my God. Who told you that?”
It was my college photography professor. Twenty-six years ago.
Rather than draw attention to my age, I tried to trick her into thinking of me as someone cool, as we said 26 years ago. “I hope you don’t think this gives you the right to make fun of me on your Facebook page,” I said.
“My Facebook page?” this person asked incredulously. “My page? Is that what you think Facebook is?”
Suddenly a vague memory from my childhood — the time someone else’s mother left her family, wrote a few young adult novels and ended up in a sad apartment complex on the edge of town — welled up, unbidden.
I needed to banish it, along with all evidence of this humiliating conversation. But how?
I vowed to fight on her turf.
So last week I joined Facebook, the social network for students that opened its doors last fall to anyone with an e-mail address. The decision not only doubled its active membership to 24 million (more than 50 percent of whom are not students), but it also made it possible for parents like me to peek at our children in their online lair.
At Facebook.com, I eyed the home page (“Everyone can join”) with suspicion. I doubted Facebook’s sincerity. What could a site created by a student who was born three years after I started mispronouncing “Henri Cartier-Bresson” want with me?
Realizing that these were cynical, mocking thoughts cheered me — I felt edgier already — and gave me the courage to join.
After I got my Profile page, the first thing I did was to search for other members — my daughter and her friends — to ask them to be my friends.