What to offer with omission

Last weekend my mother told me that our 78-year-old neighbor in Charlotte was dying of a brain tumor. First, I was struck by the dull vacancy of my mind trying to wrap itself around such news. Second, I was struck by the fact that my mother waited several days after finding out herself to tell me. She said she didn't want to upset me, even though she had been feeling down for days.

Often it's impossible to read a voice. Such a feat requires the odd sense of synesthesia, which most people do not have -- aside from the ability to process minimal changes in voice inflection.

I was reminded of the reversal of my own situation. Ever since my freshman year of college, I've known how easy it is to live in two separate worlds whenever doing so happens to appeal to me. It's the beauty of omission. At school, my parents only ever know how my days pass, how my classes are going and my level of sanity based on the scraps of details I toss them over the phone lines to piece together.

Psychologists have established four main types of parenting, according to a New York Times article. There are the authoritarian parents who expect their strict rules to be followed, the authoritative parents who establish rules but take the child's opinion into consideration, the permissive parents who have few rules and indulge their children's desires and the uninvolved parents who hardly communicate with their children.

By default of the separation of college and home, our parents are limited to the authoritative, permissive or uninvolved styles, because we are bound to have some sort of mutual relationship with our parents without them watching, and thus are going to do what we personally decide to do at least half of the time.

For the most part, my parents only know something is wrong if I blatantly spell it out for them, and they only know something is fabulous when I gush about it.

I liked it that way for a long time. But lately I find that they're missing out on so much in my life, and I'm missing out on so much in their lives. Exhibit A: One of my mother's close companions has two months to live and I cannot even begin to fathom how my mother feels because she has hardly told me. While she had been cheerful in my auditory perspective for half of a week, she was silently upset.

I feel that this interchangeable disparity between impressions and actual knowledge exists not only on a parent-to-child basis through the college years, but on a friend-to-friend basis on campus.

The amount of time we can spend with our friends depends on how our schedules align, which for me lately has been gridlocked into breakfast, lunch, dinner and intermittent library hours. But are those hours enough?

It seemed that the majority of my past weekend was absorbed with socializing, but I still had three friends mention that they had breakdowns over the phone to their parents that same weekend. Granted they insist they are perfectly fine now, I am left wondering how could I not see this coming and had this happened before the parties, between the parties or after the parties?

Half the time it seems we attribute our low moods to basic fatigue and academic stress. And perhaps those are the only factors. But how do we know when our friends are dealing with something deeper if they don't tell us?

The weekend admissions of my friends reassert how possible, if not easy, it is to project contentment for the limited hours we spend in a social setting and to allow that facade to crack down the middle and spill in catharsis for the even more limited hours we have to ourselves, only to later pretend we never had to mend for a moment.

I realize that we're probably always going to live these versions of double lives, whether or not this is our intention. We will always have thoughts that will never be voiced, because to do so would require speaking through every minute of every day. So there is inevitably a process of selection when it comes to what we verbalize.

Is it our job then to know we are needed? Or just to know as often as we possibly can?

Considering the three possible parenting styles that involve the home-to-college gap could make us more aware of our "friending" styles. Are we authoritative, nudging our friends to express their frustrations when they are at first only willing to hint at them? Are we passive, just waiting for our friends to come to us when they feel the need to divulge? Or are we utterly uninvolved, never bothering to convince a friend to talk and never bothering to listen?