Finally Listening

November 20, 2020

Today was a day of sadness and healing. My son does not live at home anymore and I cherish our phone conversations in the evenings. Today, I realized that during his childhood I was not an active listener. I don’t think I listened at all. He suffers from anxiety related to loud noises and crowds. He hated trains and fireworks.

He and I shared the same home and experiences so I have spent his life making sense of his anxiety. I should know and understand because I was there. I was older than he was, I was the parent. I had more experiences with life and I understood the situation much better than he could as a young child. His anxiety was because of the train, although I could not figure out why.

Was I ever wrong!

He reminded me of an early memory, of when he was three and we were on vacation. We had gone to Ecuador to visit my sister for New Year’s Eve. Listening to my son tell the story, he remembers the explosion of fireworks on the beach that evening. (A bag of fireworks had been placed too close to the bonfire and there was an explosion and people got hurt.) This was also right after 9/11 with much news coverage.

As an adult, I recovered from the event by being thankful we did not get hurt, that we survived the event, and enjoyed the rest of our vacation. I had not made the connection to 9/11 as so many years had passed.

My son remembers the “screaming, blood, and explosions.” He finally told me that when he hears a train or sees fireworks it triggers a response that something is wrong. His memory is of a crowd of people in pure panic.

How did I not make this connection? Why did I not listen to him earlier? I encourage everyone to just “listen”. He would not have been able to articulate all of this when he was 3 years old and I did not ask when he got older.

What simple solutions and the best part is, our ‘couples meeting’ next week. If these solutions don’t work we can brainstorm more solutions. The fun part was being tremendously relaxed when we talked about them, finding solutions together, agreeing on solutions so easily, and loving every minute of our time together.