While practicing silence over the last week, I learned something about listening. Specifically, I learned that I need much more practice. I was making dinner before I had to rush around chauffeuring kids for the evening and I begged Q to sit down and talk to me about his day. He wasn’t keen on it and he may have sprained an eye-rolling muscle, but to his credit, he sat down to hang out with me.

I spend a fair amount of time trying to craft questions designed to get him to share anything with me. His end of the conversation typically consists of grunts or, if I’m lucky, one-syllable words. I don’t think it’s because he wants to keep me in the dark; I think he’s just tired and it feels tedious to him to rehash his day. His dad is the same way. But I care about him and want to know how he’s doing.

In the middle of our conversation, Q said, “Oh my god, why do you only want to talk about things that make me feel bad?”

That effectively stopped me in my tracks.

At that point, the voice in my head berated me for not practicing silence well. I asked Q to say more and he explained that he feels like casual conversations with me tend to devolve into me worrying about things. Jane agreed; she said that she knows I love her and care deeply about her, but sometimes my love and care stress the crap out of her.

I asked Q for his advice on how to have better conversations with him. Then I stopped firing questions at him and focused on being silent so I could really hear him. He told me to focus on what he loves, what makes him happy: ask about his interests and passions. Tell him about mine.   

He’s a smart guy.

I’m going through a tough moment of parenthood. I struggled when my kids were small because they needed me for everything. I mean, Q climbed out of his crib at seven months old and I didn’t sleep again for five years; three-year-old Q used to try to successfully leap whole flights of stairs (I’m not really sure what his metric for “success” was, but he kept trying anyway); pre-k Q spent a summer genuinely disappointed that I kept preventing him from “proving” to me that he could breathe under water. For a large part of his childhood, my full-time job was running around saving his life.

The weight of that responsibility felt heavy to me and it took practice to carry. Now that my kiddos are teenagers, they need me to stop carrying that weight so they can take it on themselves. I’m grateful that Q really wants me to know him. And that he wants to know me. Moving forward, my work on silence will focus on allowing the room for my teens to share with me rather than needling the minutiae of their lives out of them. I’ll leave you once more with the words of Khalil Gibran, who wrote the most succinct parenting advice I’ve come across yet—advice I’m reading on the daily as a reminder to practice the silence that will allow my teens to feel loved and respected:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet the belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.2  

Notes:
Image: Gibran, Kahlil. “05.” The Prophet. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. p. 19
1. roboqb5. “What I Hear When I'm Being Yelled At - Leslie Knope.” Imgflip, 2015, imgflip.com/i/nkr27.
2.            Gibran, Kahlil. The Prophet. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. p. 17-18