Interlocutress

We’re at a stalemate again, in that all too familiar place, staring at the hump he and I just can’t seem to get over.  I’ve made a move in his direction, thinking I could maybe see things his way. But I’m regretting my decision, wishing I could slurp back over my lips and through my vocal cords the permission I ceded to exercise a freedom I’m not sure I’m comfortable granting.

Instead of talking to him, I lament ceaselessly inside my head, searching for the magic words that will cause him to abdicate his position and leap over, squarely on my side. The trouble is I’ve used all the good letters, laying them bare on the Scrabble board of parenthood, and now I’m left in a dizzying frenzy, feverishly rearranging the consonants and vowels on my tray in desperate hope I’ll be able to spell the mother of all words, the one that causes him to see the light. Instead I’ve got nothing to work with but “to”, “it” or some similarly feeble vocable.

A wise one tells me I don’t need to have all the answers, what I need is a conversation.  “If it was easy,” he says, “someone would have figured it out a long time ago.”  I’m the person who’s been conditioned never to present a problem without being prepared to offer the solution. If this is the requisite consolation for my current quandary, it takes a few moments to sink in before I can feel soothed.

But it dawns on me that approaching this discussion without the answer, that voicing my ambivalence and frustration, and letting my words hang out there in insoluble suspension may begin to shift the burden off my shoulders. And maybe all I can ask for is incremental movement. We walk before we run.

We want our words to be impactful; we know the window of intentional listening opens sporadically and closes quickly.  We hold out for the triple word score in hopes we’ll win by a landslide.  But sometimes it’s staying in the game with a steady stream of “it”, “or” and “to” that adds up to real understanding.  Maybe I don’t need a new set of letters.