communicating

Before you begin to misconstrue anything, let me point out again that I love my family.  I think that they are the greatest and I am hard pressed to find fault in any of them. (Rebecca does stuff that annoys me, but for crying out loud, how many sisters do you know that can live together in relative harmony- the usual drama is stuff of novels and movies.)

Now that we are clear, I will tell you that my family is not big on communication.   One friend just shakes her head and laughs becasue she knows that I have an amazing family and the counselor in her can't come around the fact that we don't talk about major decisions and problems. We talk, but not a lot about feelings, even when we hurt one another.  After a period of time, it is assumed that the offending party is sorry and the offended person gets over said offense.  I just don’t think that we see the need to discuss things.

I have the tendency to carry this habit of not discussing issues over into my relationships with friends.  Confrontation makes me uncomfortable.  

But this means that I also miss out on some of the middle of the night, all our defenses are down, and these are the things that really shape me conversations.  (You know the ones?)  And slowly, all of my interactions become about how our weeks are going, or weekend plans- boring stuff really.

I have a friend who I don’t see nearly enough.  And I just realized that this friend writes a blog mainly because he knows that I will read it.  And suddenly we are able to communicate in a different way.  Not really carrying on a conversation, but just sharing our thoughts confident that the other will understand.  And it reminds me of one of my favorite summers when we spent hours in the car, always looking forward and rarely face to face, but we had the best conversations.  

I need more of that.