Heart-to-Hearts: A Place to Start
My sweetie and I can go for weeks without an indulgent heart-to-heart now that we’ve been together for over twenty years. Long-timers like us can finish each other’s sentences and ignore each other’s faults. We can laugh at the things that used to irritate us. We turn up the volume when it’s necessary or down, depending. The need to control has faded and quiet has taken its place. Having “a talk” isn’t something we seek as often as we used to. Life rolls along and with it, our vows for shared independence and kindness.
On the other hand, maintaining that calm still requires deeper conversations when things are feeling a little shaky. Which they are these days. Trish’s urgent hip replacement surgery, albeit elective, is on hold because of COVID-19 hospitalizations. My impending memoir release has raised the emotional stakes on sharing my story, especially the more painful details that I had to include to level with myself, to be true. Political conflicts have cast a long shadow, virus cases are going through the roof of the roof, families are fragmented by space and time and politics, George Floyd’s last breaths still keep breaking my heart, and a neighbor’s Trump Won sign, painted on her garage, still shrivels my nose when I pass by with the dogs. Plural.
Which is why one of those sit-down, this-is-serious talks appeared on the scene.
“I’m feeling helpless.” Trish confessed. “I don’t think we’re on the same page about the dogs.”
I tried to hide my rolling eyes by boring a hole into the fauna of the woven rug.
Just listen, I told myself. I had at least another hour’s worth of seat work to do and was ready to dive into my next Swedish lesson. I needed some ME time after walking the dogs, feeding the dogs, cajoling the dogs, fixing the morning coffee, washing the dishes from last night, making a grocery list so I could make the tamale pie later, walking the dogs (again), feeding the dogs (again), going to the store (which required waiting in a entrance line) to get the items on the grocery list for the tamale pie I was going to make later, making the tamale pie and finally, here I was ready to sit down for a couple hours to myself before attending a women’s chorus Zoom meeting after the dinner hour.
Our new dog, Happy, came to us after a series of intuitive moves. Obstacles disappeared as our desire to bring her into our home grew into a plan. We had talked through big topics like harnesses and leashes and food and borrowing a kennel and explaining to Mocha, our first dog, now nine, what we had in mind. But the dynamics between the dogs was out of our control. We felt good about the long-term possibilities of a sisterly relation, but the short term situation would arrive moment by moment, and we had no idea what each instant would bring.
I sat down across from Trish, whose walker outlined her in a cagey frame, and took a couple deep breaths. Eye contact, settled arms and legs, good posture, and I was ready to engage. “Okay. Let’s talk.”
It didn’t take us long to get into the good habits we had learned from two decades of give and take, of practice. Listen first. No fixing. Acknowledge what is heard. Walk in the shoes of the other. Only then is it fair and reasonable to add to the story. What did we learn from our thirty-minute conversation? That we both want to be needed, we both crave purpose, we both want a say in how things unfold. We talked about everything from the daily routine to how we would respond if we saw aggressive behaviors from either dog. I told Trish that I had read that absorbing a new dog into the household could take a full month, which a friend later pointed out might extend to six. Trish told me that she wanted to spend time with each dog separately so she could manage them with the constraints of her temporarily-inhibited mobility.
Beyond all of the negotiating, good outcomes, and empathetic listening, was the out-of-body experience of knowing that we were doing it again, having a heart-to-heart, the kind of conversation that guarantees results if just a few simple rules are followed.
Take turns. Listen. Mirror back what you heard. Ask open-ended questions. Listen again. Agree on what might happen next. Then kiss like you mean it.
As I reflect on how unity can be achieved in the American meadow, heart-to-hearts with our beloveds is one good place to start.
