Sometimes when people talk about things, it doesn’t make them better. Couples therapists around the land are finally coming to this realization, long after the last decade or so of trying to get men to talk and talk and talk about their feelings, which often backfires when they share that they’re angry, frustrated, disappointed, sexually bored and embarrassed by their women, anxious about their way in the world, afraid of failing any more than they have – things women don’t necessarily want to hear when they implore, “Can we talk?” Women talk to connect; women talk to fill time; women talk to be heard; women talk to find out what they actually think and feel about things; women talk to have their insecurities and angers soothed. We do not talk to open up the floodgates for our partner’s pain, lest we end up being in the all-too-likely spot of being partially, if not a whole lot, to blame. Women talk far longer than the two-minute attention span we’re told boys have. Even though two minutes remaining in an NFL game might stretch as long as 20 minutes, men’s attention wanes after two minutes. Yet at a mere two minutes, most women are just beginning to find the arc of where they want their conversation to go; we’ve barely begun. We’ve got more examples, more clarifications, way more we want to make sure is heard. The more we talk, the more we get tuned out. But this hasn’t stopped me. Not even in my writing. What you, dear reader, could read in two minutes has been edited and expanded so that it requires much more of your time. I don’t believe I have a huge male following.
Young boys don’t talk as much as girls. Even the ones who talked and shared a ton as smaller boys start to retreat a bit to the contents of their own head as they get older. Teen years are notorious for boys holding back much of their experiences from their mothers, especially since so much of what they experience is sexualized. Mom may love you, but you still need to keep her and her darned sexuality out of your brain space if you’re ever gonna have your own first kiss.
Get a pre-teen boy and a talk-a-lot mother and you have, well, apparently, my house. My guy is a talker, a sharer, although not right away when he’s in distress. He loses access to words at those times. I’ve learned to throw him the lifeline of as many words as I can in order to reel him in. I talk when he’s quiet. I talk when he has a headache. I talk when he’s got a conflict. He talks, too, don’t get me wrong. He shares things with me, including his sadnesses or worries or frustrations, sometimes even his dreams.
This morning he told me that he remembered part of a dream from last night. “It was kind of scary,” he said. “You were talking and a giant spider was chasing me.” I queried him a bit – how big was the spider (he held his hands out in front of him, creating a space larger than our toaster oven), what did it feel like in the dream (scary), what exactly was I doing while he was being chased (talk), what did I say (how cool it was), did I help at all (no), how did it end (he woke up). In his dream, he is alone with his fear; the dream-Mother seems to deny his fear, not just fail to protect him.
In waking life, I don’t particularly like spiders of any size, let alone big ones. If a toaster-oven-sized spider was chasing me, it’s likely I’d think it was dangerous, not cool. In waking life, if the same freak of nature specimen was chasing my son, I would stop at nothing to keep him safe from this object of terror. I’d throw any and all manner of object on it – a chair, a baseball bat, rocks, whatever I had. I’d kick it and stomp on it and scream until the offensive alien creature was shredded. I would go after it with full intent to kill, and if I couldn’t do it myself I’d use all my girl privilege in the world to rally others to help. I’d create a posse if I had to. It’s that primal for me – since the day I knew I was pregnant, I have been protecting his life force. I’m geared to keep doing this until the day I die.
My son’s inner psyche is gearing up for something else. Developmentally, he’s exactly on track with all the juvenile fiction he’s reading, and most of the fiction and fairy tales and myths even for young children: parents fail or die or abandon children (often the Mother is dead before the story arc even begins), thus children must leave home, chart out their own path, encounter and survive dangers on their own, and then, possibly, return home. Leaving home, doing it on one’s own, is not necessarily an indictment of parents, but rather a psychic fact – children’s minds and experiences must help them learn that they are not infinitely helpless, small, vulnerable creatures who will die if their parents don’t help them. Children must transform into capable humans, ready to take on the challenges of independence and autonomy: their own life, relationships, worldly endeavors, sexuality, hormones, even middle school.
In the dream I didn’t fight the spider, but neither did he. He didn’t slay it; didn’t use his powers of language and problem-solving to outwit it. He kept running and it kept chasing him. All my previous forms of helping – 11+ years of talking to him to help him understand the world and himself – were not enough for him to be victorious over the inner anxiety. It is scary to leave the safety of parental love and protection, especially when we are yet untested in our ability to survive. The dream lets me know my son is hardly done with this part of his internal journey yet, but just beginning. He’s not yet ready to take on the fight, but he’s preparing for the time when he is.
Lesson learned: Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. My son needs me not to fight the spiders. Needs me to step aside, stop “helping” in the old ways, let him start to handle anxieties on his own. It’s time for his psyche to hear less and less of me so he can hear more and more of himself. So he can start generating ideas, see his strengths not just on a math or spelling test, but in the world of action and hairy foes that will chase him down. I may need to invoke a two-minute warning when I’m about to launch in to a “helpful” talk – a formerly far-reaching life lesson where I’ve attempted to convey a lifetime of advice and wisdom and morality and ethics and love, of course love. Two minutes to listen to what he has to say, murmur a little something, then I’ll call that game over. Move on. Hit the locker room. Hand over the protection duty to him. My girlfriends will have to be the ones to absorb all that will remain unsaid. Or my husband, if only I can get it down to a manageable sound bite.