they never talk when you want them to talk #10yearsaparent

I have two children with very different personalities.

One that will tell you everything in detail. And not only will he tell you, he wants to talk about it. He needs to share, work out his experiences, and his emotions (kind of like Taylor Swift trapped in a seven year old boy’s body). It’s how he processes. Often he can’t fall asleep, because he can’t clear his head, and he tells me that, “Mom, I just can’t turn my brain off.”

I sit on the edge of his bed and listen, even though I want the day to be over. He likes to talk with the lights on so he can “see my face.” I want the lights off so the pinched look of exhaustion is hidden in darkness.

My other son operates on the opposite end of the spectrum. He will talk about logistics and facts, but if it’s anything remotely emotional, he locks up like a vault. If it’s pitch black in his room, and way after bedtime, you might get a little sliver, but you have to work for it. He becomes a safe I want to crack. I keep trying different combinations.

I try to tease something, anything, out of him. Most of the time the response is silence.

I tell him, “I know how you feel.”

Because I do. As far as personality, I identify much more with my introverted son. I hesitate to call him quiet, because he isn’t quiet. He’s internal. And I get that. Because I was that child, and I am that adult.

I know what it feels like to have something on your mind, to want so badly to be relieved of its burden but feel incapable of forming the words. More times than I can count, I have felt paralyzed by my own emotions knowing I should say something. But unable to find the words, I say nothing.

Watching him do the same is hard on both me and his extroverted father. I understand that it’s my son’s nature to internalize his emotions. But I also feel the need to show him what took me most of my life to learn. I need to teach him to find the words and find the safety to say them. I want him to know that it doesn’t have to be that way. That with practice, it gets easier. That you can learn to say how you feel. And when you say how you feel, the world does not end.

As a parent, it can be frustrating to have a kid that won’t talk to you. If something is bothering him, his fear of admitting a mistake, getting in trouble, or being rejected feels so huge. It’s a wall that seems unsurmountable. He puts his hands over his face hoping to make it all go away.

I know how he feels.

If I can share a story about myself and how I struggled or made a mistake, I have a shot at getting a sentence out of him. If I can convince him that letting the words out lifts the burden, he will sometimes relent. If I can remind him that we all make mistakes and there is nothing that he can say that will make me love him any less, he can sometimes find the release.

And with time, the periods of silence have gotten shorter and less painful. For both of us.

I know I can’t change who my son is. I can’t turn him into something he is not. But, I will keep sitting in the dark waiting, until he is ready to talk.

#tenyearsaparent is a weekly blog series about what I’ve learned in my first ten years as a parent. Whether you’re a parent nodding in agreement or shaking your head with disgust or a non-parent using these posts as birth control (the surgeon general wants me to tell you that reading blog posts about parenting is not an effective form of birth control), I’ll be spilling the beans on what parenting is really all about.