White Noise Wisdom

Today I drove to the mountains and it was raining sideways and the wind sounded like a chorus of ghosts on a Halloween soundtrack. My car inched up the mountain road, hazards on, with likely no more than 100 feet of visibility.

And I figured something out about parenting.

I can talktalktalk and talk to my adult kids imparting the most insightful revelations I've ever heard. I can make so much sense to myself that I get chills, and think "I am amazing. My command of the English language is precise, intelligent, and wise. I wish someone would've told me all of these life lessons when I was in my 20's."

I learned long ago that everyone (EXCEPT for my children) sees and hears through their own veils of experience. In our case, their veils were my veils--we shared the same veils--and they could always hear me because they are a part of me, they think like me and understand the world like I do.

Drugs are bad.

Your body is your temple.

Be humble.

Stand up for yourself and your beliefs.

Funny. Haha. Wrong.

Turns out, it's all about white noise! *

I could be saying "run fast, a tsunami is coming" and they could be staring at a grey hair on my head, thinking "wow, mom is really getting grey."

Although my words offer every hope and victory and stumble and experience that my kids "need" to hear, the sounds I make blur into the background of their own individual thoughts..

I've no clue what they hear. I've no clue what they think. I can't assume anything.

It's time to listen more and talk less.

That will be the beginning of something beautiful.

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*White noise is a sound that contains every frequency within the range of human hearing. (http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/white-noise) Ie: if you are in a sports stadium with thousands of people all talking at the same time, you will hear something like a blurred roar.