Wait

“Just wait a minute” he said to me from the other room.

I stood contemplating what he said to me. I was standing still and waiting and couldn’t understand why he was asking me to wait because I wasn’t going anywhere. I was trying to understand if there was something that I was doing that was causing him to feel like I was leaving him. This wasn’t the first time that my son had asked me to wait when I wasn’t leaving and I decided that I needed to understand more clearly what he was saying to me. 

When he came out of the room I asked for his full attention.

“Hey baby, can I ask you something?”

“Yeah” he responded and looked up at me. 

“I wasn’t going anywhere, I was waiting for you but you asked me to wait for you and I am trying to understand what I was doing that made you feel like I was going to leave.” 

“Oh, no.” he said with a smile. “I felt pressured for time, I didn’t think that you were leaving” he responded with a laugh. 

“Ok, well we have time baby” I responded.

Later that night when I was reflecting about my day this engagement came up. I realized that my brain originally interpreted his comment about me physically leaving and wanting me to physically wait for him but how he meant the comment was he wanted time to slow down, he wanted the world to pause for a minute. As I sat silently reflecting about this interaction I realized just how powerful it is to ask for clarity during conversations. We often have a projection in our mind about what we THINK the other person is saying to us, the context around their communication but what we THINK is often inaccurate and this was a beautiful example of that. Now that I understood what my son was saying I could adjust how I engaged with him. Now that I understood that what he was actually saying was that he felt pressure around the timing of the day's events I could have a conversation with him about how he would like me to communicate the timing of the day, what would be ideal for him to receive for communication so that he didn’t feel pressure.