40-Year-Old Suburban Mom Finally Figures Out Emojis. World Never the Same.

Today I finally figured out how to do an emoji thing on Twitter. My world is forever changed. It’s not that I am stupid or computer illiterate. It’s just that I’m 40. Emojis to me are like what texting was to my my parents’ generation: a thing of technological wonder that belongs firmly to the generation below me that I struggle to fully comprehend (but am warming up to).

I’ve been using emojis in texts for a long time because you just push the smiley face icon and choose one. Easy. But then I noticed that people are doing these on Twitter and Facebook too. But there’s no smiley icon to push. Color me baffled. I just assumed it was sorcery. Typically, when I can’t figure something out I just assume that magic’s involved or you have to be under 40 to have gotten the memo on how to make it work.

Someone told me that I could add a cute little fox face emoji to my Twitter handle, but I didn’t believe I could ever learn how to do it. But look! It worked!

Whenever people who are hip to new technology add something cool to their repertoire, they never seem to get around to telling moms in the suburbs how to do it. If there are easy directions for any of this, I’ve never seen them. So it was just me, sitting in front of the computer, trying to figure this out like I was solving the riddle of the sphinx (a sphinx with a cute, smiling fox face taunting me). When I finally figured it out, it was immediately followed by hooting and hollering and cheers of jubilation as the little fox face I wanted finally appeared on the screen. I felt as proud of myself as if I had cracked The DaVinci Code. It’s probably the thing I’m most proud of so far this week.

I will most likely never advance in my Twittering skills much beyond being able to put a fox face in my profile and add little flowers and other symbols to my texts here and there. But that’s okay with me because I don’t envision a need for much more than that.

As a mom of three, so much of my life has been about making snacks, wiping backsides, and mediating squabbles and childhood disputes involving my brood of little ones. I feel like it’s hard for me to always keep track of whatever new technological thing people are doing. This is what must be happening in the world when I am having to listen to the latest round of “You always get to have the last pickle” or “I wanted to have the onion that looks like Snoopy” or “My sister isn’t doing whatever it is I want her to be doing to entertain me in this very moment!”

Figuring out how to slip that little fox into my Twitter might not rank up there with landing a man on the moon, historically speaking, but I felt good about solving this little puzzle that presented itself and gaining access to a world of emojis that had been off-limits to me until this afternoon. And now I’m going to help you do it too. If I can decorate with emojis, so can you.

Find out how on the next page:

STEP 1

Open your social media account in one window and open another window next to it and go to Emojipedia, a literal encyclopedia of emojis.

STEP 2

Find the emoji you want to display on your social media page. (Check out the holiday emojis! LOVE.)

STEP 3

Click the button near the emoji you want that says COPY (this is where it gets a little nerve wracking because nothing seems to happen except for a little flashing box that says “copied!” on the screen, so you can’t tell if it has actually done anything, but it really works).

STEP 4

Go back to your social media feed and paste the invisible spell into your message and voila! Sorcery!

You, too, can feel this sense of pride and accomplishment by using the Emojipedia site. If you’ve silently wondered how the heck people are able to do this stuff on social media but you were too afraid to ask and didn’t want to feel dumb not knowing, I went through this for you today and am putting my discovery out there so you can benefit. Hopefully you’ll figure out something else that stumps me and share it somewhere one day because all us moms and dads (and 40-somethings in general) need to stick together.

[Warning to my editor: You will most likely be wading through all the emojis that may be popping up in my ✍ but there is no✋ing me.]