Ear to Ear Combat

I read somewhere that we actually have a "National Listening Day" on May 16.  This annoys me for a number of reasons, but mostly because it seems to be counter-intuitive...my whine about this type of celebratory day is the same for this specific one:  we all should be working on listening to each other everyday or we will be engaged in, as my daughter called it last week, "Ear-to-Ear Combat".

As part of my nightly conversation with my daughter, we were laying in the dark meandering all around the listening subject and I asked her about her earlier comment that listening is 'ear to ear combat'...she said it's like when she's playing war with her older brother and his friends and she's always put in the corner of the yard as the "POW" so they can ignore her while saying they are playing with her...she said as the littlest person in the household her words always seem to lose out, or as she sees it, "...put in the corner", especially by her brother, and that they have to fight to be heard.

She went on to say that mostly he only hears what he wants to hear from her. 

I agree with her--not just about her brother, but in general.  We all have a problem with only hearing what we want to hear, regardless of who you are listening to. 

Sometimes it is because you want them to be saying something different, or saying it differently.  Sometimes it's because you will only hear a certain thing, no matter what they are trying to say.  Sometimes it's because you are so busy trying to figure out what to say next, you just hear what they are saying in the best context for your comment.

Regardless of why, not truly hearing what the other person is saying rarely leads to happy moments for anyone.

I am on this subject because it's summer which means the kids are thrown together a lot more than during the school year...and being 7 and 10 they each have a strength of will that would put Napolean or Ghandi to shame.  And because my husband desperately needs to be heard by an adult by the end of his day and I'm not always available as that's all I've been doing all day.  Not surprisingly, it's on his mind as well, as the post on his blog (http://carnefelize.blogspot.com/) the other day (A Parentalogue on Process), talks about it from his perspective. 

Needless to say, there is not a lot of listening happening right now so it's something we are working on..sometimes painfully.  When my son asks for the more expensive but three-row rental car for our driving vacation, I'm almost tempted to spend the money. But no, we'll get the two-row car and we'll have fun, dammit!

So ironically it's in the midst of this that I find I chose as part of my summer reading pile, to re-read for the umpteenth time "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee.  Which, at it's heart, is about a situation where people only heard and saw what they wanted to hear--Boo Radley and Tom Robinson were only known by what others said about them,  except for the children who seem to hear the truth of and behind everything. Most people say that this book is a lecture on the sin of killing people without a voice.  You can also flip the penny and say it is a sin to, as my daughter said, only listen with blinders and hear only what you want to hear.

On the lighter side of listening, I'm reading for the first time the Vish Puri mysteries by Tarquin Hall...an investigator after my own heart as he is very much the Perry Mason/Precious Ramostwe-good listening type of crime solver. They listen with their heart and head, often leading to the right, but "grey-ish" decision.  There are two books about this Indian private investigator and they are a fantastic read.

For children, a favorite book in our house is Hepcat, by William Bramhall about a musician who has 'lost his groove'.  He's told to 'cruise the scene and find his music' and while wary at first, he let's  himself go and finds his music again in the sounds around him from the thunder to wind in the trees to birds and more.  It's a fun, lyrical read and the illustrations are really groovy.  But most importantly, it's a light but impactful way to talk about the importance of listening and what you can lose if you don't.

My hope is that by the end of our driving vacation we will all have gotten over this phase in our various relationships and will have moved from Ear-to-Ear Combat to something less aggressive and in nature. 

Hmmm, maybe I should get the three-row car just to help that process out.