THE AWKWARD MOM

because uncomfortable conversations are the ones worth having

Tag: listening (page 1 of 2)

9 Ideas to Parent with More Emotional Health This Week

Reading Time: 2 minutes

ways to parent with emotional health

Looking for ways to parent with more emotional health?

Here’s nine. (Start with, like, two.) read more

2 (Non-Gift) Gifts to Give Your Kids this Month

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gifts to give your kids

In a couple of weeks, my youngest turns 13. Which means I will soon be parenting four teenagers. Which means my prayer life is thriving.

As some parents of tweens chatted with my husband and me last week, I recalled some of the best advice given to us for parenting teens: Keep them talking. Keep the relational bridge open.

It’s great advice for all of parenting, right? But at times with each of my kids, that’s required supreme effort. read more

Questions to Take Your Relationship With God Deeper

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relationship with God

This week on a phone conversation with a friend, she asked what’s become our custom at the end of our calls: What’s one intimate prayer request I can pray for?

It was probably telling that I didn’t really know. read more

How to Be an Emotionally Safe Place for Your Spouse

Reading Time: 6 minutes

emotionally safe place

When my husband and I tied the knot, I was pounds lighter–and not just because that was four kids ago. I was peering over the edge of anorexia.

My carefully constructed salads for most meals and stringent rules for all things eating meant I was consuming around 1200 calories a day. I jogged relentlessly. And I was only beginning to recognize the deep dysfunction beneath my white-knuckled control over my life–complete with spiritual overtones. read more

Presence: Ideas to be All There with Your Kids

Reading Time: 4 minutes

presence

When I first arrived back after living in Africa, it surprised me. I discovered it over lattes, or in the church foyer, or checking out at the grocery store.

I realized a lot of people were hungry, starved even, to be listened to. To have someone look them in the eye, even for a few seconds, and be with them. Undistracted. Agenda-free. Curious. Empathetic. read more

31 Conversation Starters for Teens, to Talk About What’s Real

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conversation starters for teens

Last week, I rubbed shoulders with an old friend:

Guilt. read more

Am I a conversation starter or stopper?

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conversation starter

A missionary friend told me once of a person she’d spoken with who, as a child in Africa, was slapped every time she asked a question.

I was moved by the person’s insight: “You don’t just stop asking questions,” they’d mused to my friend. read more

“I just don’t understand”: What it says about me

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I just don't understand

“I just don’t understand how…”

I heard it again this week from someone else. This is after hearing it more times than I could count with someone else’s conflict.

Sure, there are times when this phrase fits in an argument. I could’ve used it, say, when my son this morning initially refused to clean off the stovetop because he only put the grease there, not the crumbs.

This was after I had been cleaning up others’ messes for about an hour while he slept before school.

I may have flipped my lid…?

This is an occasion where I could see myself saying (or may have indirectly said?), I DO NOT UNDERSTAND how you do not see yourself responsible for being your brother’s/sister’s/I-don’t-care-who’s keeper to clean up their few crumbs, yet see me as responsible for yours.

But I digress.

“I just don’t understand” how you could be that dumb

I’ve recently heard “I just don’t understand” in contexts like this:

I just don’t understand why this person doesn’t want my feedback.

Man, I don’t understand how someone can’t just be responsible for themselves.

I just don’t understand how all those idiots can vote for [name].

Really?! I don’t understand how someone can be a true Christian/American/thoughtful human and support [whatever].

So if you will allow my two cents: In general, “I just don’t understand” doesn’t feel like a waving banner of emotional maturity. For us. For our kids.

And it is killing us–as a nation, and even as a Church.

Because We’ve Been Understood

Allow me one Scriptural defense. In Philippians 2, catch the source of our compassion for others: It’s Jesus’ compassion and understanding of us.

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, 

complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 

Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

What if Jesus had just been like, I just don’t understand how you could [insert disgusting or just reprehensible weakness]. 

It’s our intimate, I’ve-lived-this knowledge of Jesus’ own sympathy with us that helps us walk a mile in someone else’s Chuck Taylors. We’ve felt this God-man who is “not…unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are” (Hebrews 4:15).

(Not to be confused with the Jack Handy quote: “Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, you’ll be a mile from them, and you’ll have their shoes.” Forgive me, people. It’s Friday.)

Jesus gets us. He climbed into our skin.

“Can you really not see it?!”

My husband pointed out to me once that if we can’t see how someone else CANNOT SEE something (hello, the underwear lying next to the hamper? The toilet paper sitting on top of the holder?), it could be a sign it’s a God-given area of strength for us.

If you can’t figure out how a person in poverty can’t show up for a job–maybe it’s a sign you haven’t had parents who struggled to remain employed. That you’ve never known illiteracy or life without private transportation or mental illness or the vise of addiction.

I confess that for a few years in Africa, I had thoughts like this. (Spoiler: Still have them.)

When I saw the grocery-store stocker snoozing, perched on a crate in the aisle, I thought: lazy.

But what if, along with the maybe-or-maybe-not paycheck, I was the one turning over on the ground at night in a noisy, dangerous neighborhood? What if I served 12 hours as a night guard as my second job while attending classes during the morning for a better shot at providing for my kids?

Could that person actually be hardworking, and caught in a moment of exhaustion? (Picture me dozing in church during my first trimester.)

See, my swift judgment—maybe sweetly called “discernment” or righteous indignation—has prevented me at times from witnessing God’s beauty and glory in others.

I’m talking the breadth of his image as expressed in a robust, diverse Church, drinking in his wide mercy right along with me. A beauty different from God’s Western, female, middle-class, Caucasian image in me.

What’s some behavior or belief you just can’t understand?

Now, when I catch “I just don’t understand” about to fly out of my mouth–I think, Shoot. Haven’t even tried. Or at least not hard enough.

Maybe I could think, Jesus, thanks for “getting” me. No matter what. And, How can I raise kids who “get” everybody else?

How can I listen to you better?

And in a season where so often I hear “I just can’t understand” the people who watch Fox or CNN, or vote red or blue, or protest or don’t:

If we can’t understand?

For goodness’ sake. Let’s try.

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All There: Tips on Being Fully, Powerfully Present

Reading Time: 5 minutes

present presence being there

Ever get that feeling the person in front of you is there-but-not-there?

I’m totally guilty of this–those moments my kids are telling me something and they’re like, “Mom.” Because I’m too often multitasking–probably for their sakes, but still: not present in the moment they care about.

Or there’s another weird thing that saps my presence. Sometimes I’ve been going so hard for so long, ignoring the fact that I’m hungry or worn out or need care–that it saps my ability to really be there; to be able to fully give of myself.

I might make the right gestures or expressions or noises, but as far as that whole “love must be sincere” thing (Romans 12:9)? I’m actually a little bit duplicitous. Metaphorically, I’m too hungry to be handing out food.

But presence is something we don’t do well as a culture. (Maybe it’s just a human-being thing.)

Unfortunately, it results in an entire continent of the emotionally-starved. Presence is a precious form of love.

What Presence Is

It’s the reason I ask my teenagers to put their cellphones in the decorative bowl when they come in, and pull out the earbuds when they’re with actual people. It’s the reason I’m trying more to put down what I’m doing, and take that beat for some eye contact. For the person across from me to get 100% of my mental pie graph.

I’ve decided to define presence like this for now: to be wholly there.

Authors John and Stasi Eldredge note,

The gift of presence is a rare and beautiful gift. To come―unguarded, undistracted―and be fully present, fully engaged with whoever we are with at that moment. When we offer our unguarded presence, we live like Jesus.*

Reading this, I think of the God who wasn’t content with never being seen, never touching, with a self-centered failure to engage: “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14).

presence present power of being there

What’s it look like to be present?

Honestly, I think it starts with being fully present with God. But it’s easier to wrap mental fingers around the tangible, so I’ll start with that in this post. (Be ready next week.)

Fully receive someone.

We provide that place where they can be completely themselves and completely accepted. We’re a refuge; a safe place. Our affection for the person themselves trumps our own agendas for them.

Listen well.

So often, we listen in order to respond, rather than listening to empathize; to understand. Philippians 2—in the famous passage where we’re told to, in humility, count others more significant than yourselves—go up a few verses. Paul speaks of that others-significance proceeding from our own comfort from God’s love, from affection and sympathy for each other.

(If you’re interested, check out this post on doing this in marriage: How to See Your Spouse with New Eyes.)

We are first loved and received by God so we can then set aside our inner grasping. But that takes a lot of work: to truly sink our imagination into someone else’s shoes, asking questions about what we don’t know.

Sometimes, when a person has stopped talking, I’ve found it interesting to see what happens when I wait an extra five seconds. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the person shares a little more than they would have if I would have jumped in with my oh-so-superb advice.

present presence being there

Ask good questions.

It’s actually one of my vices: I tend to not answer what isn’t asked. It’s a stupid technique that I’ve used in the past to hold people at arm’s length. (DO NOT DO THIS.)

But I also realize that as we all get busier, we get less curious about each other and the part of their emotional iceberg hovering beneath the surface.

Sometimes this means asking for answers we may already know. God models this for me. I think of him in the Garden of Eden: Where are you? What have you done?

I think God asks questions like this in order to engage with us. He’s not asking for information. He’s asking to connect. To welcome. To allow expression and desire and interpretation.

I am now a question-collector. What would move my understanding and compassion for this person to the next level? What would love them better? So I gently ask questions like this (grab sixty more questions like this through the links in this post!):

  • What was that like?
  • What was going through your head?
  • What do you wish you/they could have said?
  • What were you hoping for?
  • What does that make you afraid of? (What were you afraid would happen?)
  • If a person expresses anger: Anger is a secondary emotion–usually occuring after fear, hurt, disappointment, rejection…what do you feel under your anger?
  • What do you feel, if it happened, would make your life sing right now?

A lot of these questions help isolate desire, including hope and fear. And those help us understand the core of what fuels and drives.

 

Cut the noise.

When I think about what stands in the way of presence, it’s usually psychological noise of some kind:

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Reading Time: 4 minutes

 

Of all the vibrancy of being in another culture this week, one of my least favorite is the language barrier. It’s as if I’m constantly stopping myself from asking the questions I want to know of people–from relating.

The late neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, in his bestselling When Breath Becomes Air, writes of the two areas of speech in the brain:

If both areas are damaged, the patient becomes an isolate, something central to her humanity stolen forever. After someone suffers a head trauma or a stroke, the destruction of these areas often restrains the surgeon’s impulse to save a life. What kind of life exists without language?[1, emphasis added]

Perhaps it’s melodramatic, but I’d argue the absence of each others’ stories robs us a bit of our humanity, our connectedness. We’re picking up on someone’s story just by their haircut; their tattoos; their clothes; their fingernails.

But communication is so much more than appearances, right? We want to know how old someone is, where they came from, what they fill your days with, what their relationship is like with their mother-in-law. We want to know what fires someone up, what breaks their heart.

Though it can of course be misused, there’s something to be said for simple, loving curiosity: for caring enough to understand.

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