My son is at the age where we have life lesson conversations in the car, en route to some activity. We’ve had some lovely discussions, and their brevity and the guarantee of having to end when we reach our destination lends a kind of safety – to both of us. These will not be marathon conversations from which neither one of us can escape.
No, this is the snippet version – drop a topic, get a thought or idea in, then out of the car he heads. And for the record, he’s often the one that initiates these conversations, as he still feels welcome to bring gigantic, unanswerable questions to me. We’ve had some great conversations like this, on pretty big topics – how do you know if God is real, how do you talk to girls, how can he start remembering to do stuff so I can nag less, how does he want to apologize to a friend if he’s hurt their feelings, what do I remember about being a little girl, are the people in China walking around upside down (since they’re below us on the globe and if you drilled a hole through the earth you’d get directly there), and so on.
Last night, we were talking about how complicated it’s going to be for kids in his generation to hang out with their friends, as so many of his friends’ families have experienced divorce, and now the kids live in two houses. How to know which house the friend is at if you want to hang out with them? What if the schedules are opposite? Can you ever ask a kid to change their schedule with their parents?
I anticipated that we’d end up talking about cell phones and text messaging and I’d steer the conversation toward developing the communication skills to ask kids where they’re likely to be at any given moment.
“Maybe grown-ups should just like each other more when they get married,” he stated.
“Hmmmm,” I stalled for a reply. We had a few more miles to go before our destination, so I had plenty of time to add something.
My son was giving me a life lesson, and it was my turn to stay quiet after the important revelation. So I did.
Nice.
ReplyDelete