000022 — Conversations
No one really tells you, or at least no one told me, that there’s a season where your primary environment of interaction with your kids is your car, to and from school, school to activities, back home, then back out again, its wild we’re driving 1,500 to 2,000 miles a month right now, spending a meaningful portion of our life inside the same few square feet. Lauren and I joke about our shifts. I take the morning shift, she takes the evening shift, we overlap, and it turns into a little family road trip, and we try, as much as we can, not to turn the car into four separate places. No music as background noise. No autopilot miles. We choose conversation, even when we’re tired, even when it would be easier to let the day happen to us.
Last month, I was reading Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s The Strength to Love, and I’d bring something I underlined, sometimes literally an excerpt I wrote down, and we’d talk about it on the way to school. The car is also where Noah’s “what ifs” are most alive. They can be exhausting, and I can feel myself start to rush him, and then I remember: one day he won’t ask as many, one day I won’t get this seat beside him; so I play along and savor it, the fact that for the fourth time this week he wants to ask what if Wakanda was real and what if we’re Wakandan descendants, I’m laughing as I write that, I love how playful his mind is, how curious he stays, how easily his imagination opens a door, that’s a posture I want to protect in him.
And then the doors shut, and they’re gone, and the silence hits. It’s immediate, sonic, resonant, the absence of something that was full and then suddenly you’re alone inside your own thoughts again, and if you’re a parent you know that moment. It can be relieving, and it can also feel strange, like your body is still adjusting to the quiet. I’ll usually let it sit for a few miles, or I’ll turn on an audiobook, and once a week, sometimes more, I’ll use that drive to make a phone call, usually to the person I owe a response to and have been “meaning to get back to.”
Last week, after the doors shut and I collected myself, I called a friend I hadn’t texted back in months. He answered on the first ring even though it was early where he lives, very early, and if you’ve never had a phone call with me it’s usually picking up right where we left off, like the conversation never ended, I hit him with the long “yooooo, what’s good,” and he started telling me what’s been going on in his world with the kind of detail you only get when someone’s actually speaking. You can hear the house in the background. You can hear the emotion that would never survive a string of “lol” and reaction emojis and read receipts. You can say, put me on speaker, let me say hi. In this case his wife was around, so we had our own little side conversation for a minute, simple and lovely, and the call went so long that when I got near my neighborhood I found myself circling because I didn’t want to lose service through the dead zone on the road to my house.
The legacy post can wait. I’m feeling the pull to make this one about how rich real relational community still is, especially compared to the default way most of us communicate now: little message threads that turn people you love into updates, logistics, quick confirmations, and that weird thin feeling where you technically “kept up” and did not actually connect.
I grew up inside this shift, corded phones to AIM to BlackBerry, RIP RIM, IYKYK. One moment it was corded phones, then your own phone in your room, then your own line, and then boom, threaded conversations and chat rooms and the quiet expectation that you’re always reachable, always able to respond, always able to keep the loop going.
When the default becomes a constant stream of micro-transactions, something changes, and I notice it in myself first. It gets easier to treat a person like a task to clear. It gets easier to aim for handled instead of held. “Send me the details.” “Tell me the answer.” And if I want real relationships, which I do, and I find myself craving them more and more in a modern life, I have to choose them on purpose, and sometimes that means I call one person instead of sending ten texts, and I let it be longer than efficient, and I let it be awkward for a second, and I know I’ll talk to fewer people, and the people I do talk to will actually feel like people.
That last paragraph is where there original post ended, as I’ve been editing this post, something in me healed. Some old moments in cars had a shameful grip on me, on the story I tell myself, on my identity. The kind of shame that makes you edit your own past before anyone else can. The happiness, life, joy, and conversations in our car now are a complete inversion from my relationship with time in the car when I was my kids’ age. The car was also our home for an extended season. I can still hear my mom when we’d park somewhere for the night: “Okay, get comfortable.” I grew up thinking that was a traumatic period of my life. It was. It was also an adventure. Our car now has less trauma, and it’s as full of adventure as ever.
