I noticed something last week, on a Sunday afternoon in Bangkok, that I have not been able to put down since.
My mother and I have been having, for about as long as I can remember, the same conversation in two parts. The first part happens on the phone. The phone call is its own ritual. It runs five or six minutes. We exchange the standard operational updates, the small ongoing notes about her week and mine. She tells me about the garden, or about something on television, or about a small piece of news from the wider family. I respond with the appropriate small responses. The call ends, generally, around the time one of us mentions needing to get back to whatever else is happening in the day.
The second part of the conversation happens, reliably, about twenty minutes after we hang up. I will be doing something else by then. Walking the dogs. Making tea. Standing at the kitchen window looking at nothing in particular. And, in some real way that I have not, until last week, fully acknowledged to myself, I will start having the rest of the conversation. The part of the conversation I did not, on the actual phone, manage to have.
In the second part, I say the things I had been wanting to say during the first part. The things I noticed she was glossing over. The follow-up questions I did not ask. The harder versions of the easy questions I did ask. The acknowledgment, where it would have been warranted, of what she had said underneath what she was saying. The second part of the conversation is, in some real way, the more substantive version of the first. The second part is the version in which we are actually talking to each other rather than performing the script of a Sunday afternoon call.
The strange thing, last week, was when I realized that in the second part, she also says things she did not say on the phone. The version of her I am talking to, twenty minutes after we hang up, is a slightly different mother than the one I just spoke to. The slightly different mother says, in the second-part conversation, the things she did not, on the actual phone, manage to say. The second-part mother is more direct than the first-part mother. The second-part mother says what she means. She lets a small remark stand without immediately covering it with the next small remark. She allows, in some real way, the conversation to go somewhere that the first-part mother, in the actual phone call, did not allow it to go.
The two parts of the conversation, when I noticed them together last week, struck me as worth taking seriously. Not because the second part is, in any real sense, the actual conversation. It is not. The actual conversation is the one that occurred on the phone. The second part is something I am, in some real way, constructing in my own head. But the construction is telling me something about what the first part is failing to do, and the failure is, I now suspect, one of the central structural features of how my mother and I have been talking to each other for forty years.
What the first part does, and what it does not do
I want to think carefully about the first part, because the first part is what we actually have. The second part is a kind of imaginative supplement. The first part is the relationship.
The first part does, on close examination, a great deal of work. It maintains the contact. It demonstrates, to both of us, that we are still in each other’s lives. It exchanges the operational information that allows us to be roughly informed about what is happening in each other’s weeks. It performs, in some real way, the ongoing structural fact of being mother and son across four decades and seven thousand miles. The first part is not nothing. The first part is, in some structural sense, the basic furniture of how we conduct the relationship.
What the first part does not do is most of the interior work that, in a different kind of relationship, the conversations would also be doing. The first part does not, in any active sense, allow either of us to bring our actual current interiors into the room. The first part is calibrated, by long practice, to a register that the actual interiors cannot easily enter. The register is the operational-update register. The register is reliable. The register is also, on close examination, almost entirely insulated from anything that would require either of us to be more present than we have, by long practice, agreed to be.
This is, I now think, why the second part of the conversation keeps happening. The second part is the part of me that has, by the end of the actual phone call, registered all the things the actual phone call did not have room for. The second part is the disposal mechanism by which the unspoken material gets processed. The processing is not, in any final sense, satisfactory. The processing happens, however, because the alternative would be to walk around all afternoon with the unspoken material undigested in my interior. The second-part conversation is, in some real way, the small ongoing internal labor required to make the first-part conversation livable.
Why the actual conversation cannot, in most cases, do this work
I want to be honest about why my mother and I have not, across forty years, been able to convert the second-part conversation into the first-part one. The reasons are not, on close examination, anyone’s fault. The reasons are structural.
The first reason is that the first-part conversation is, by long convention, conducted in a register that my mother and I have, over decades, refined to perform a particular function. The function is the maintenance of the connection at a temperature that both of us can sustain. The temperature is calibrated to be warm enough that we both feel held and cool enough that neither of us is being asked to bring more of ourselves than we have, by long practice, learned to bring. The calibration works. The calibration is also, on close examination, what prevents the second-part material from entering the first-part conversation. If I were to introduce the second-part material into the first-part conversation, the temperature would shift. The shifted temperature would, in some real way, be more than the long-running configuration of our calls can sustain.
The second reason is that my mother and I do not, on either side, have the vocabulary for the second-part conversation in any of our shared registers. The vocabulary involves saying things like: I noticed that you glossed over the part about my brother just now, and I want to ask what is actually going on with that. Or: I am hearing that the garden is fine, but I am also hearing something underneath that I do not have a name for, and I would like to ask about it. The vocabulary is not, by any honest accounting, available to us. We have never used it. We have not modeled it. We do not, on either side, quite know how to deploy it without producing, in the other party, the kind of confusion that would shut down the rest of the call.
The third reason is that the second-part conversation requires the participants to be more present, in real time, than the first-part conversation requires. The being-more-present is, on close examination, the harder skill. My mother and I have both, in our own ways, spent a great deal of our lives learning to manage interactions without being fully present in them. The skill has served us. The skill has also, by long practice, become the operating system. Switching off the operating system, in any single phone call, is not, in either of our cases, currently available. The switching-off would require structural conditions that have not been built. The structural conditions cannot, in most cases, be built in a five-minute Sunday call.
What the second-part conversation is, in some real way, doing for me
I want to think honestly about what role the second-part conversation plays in my interior life, because I have not, until last week, looked at it directly.
The second-part conversation is, on close examination, a small piece of relational maintenance I am performing alone. The maintenance is the work that the first-part conversation cannot, by its structure, accomplish. I am, in the twenty minutes after the call, doing the substantive part of the conversation by myself, in my head, with a constructed version of my mother that is more available than the actual one. The construction is not, in any final sense, dishonest. The constructed mother is built from forty years of actual material. The construction is calibrated to who I genuinely believe my mother is, underneath the configuration she conducts our calls in. The constructed version is not a fantasy. The constructed version is, more accurately, the version of my mother that I have, by long observation, come to believe is in there but cannot, in our actual calls, fully surface.
What I am doing with this constructed version is, in some real way, having the relationship I would have liked to have with the actual mother, in the absence of any structural conditions under which the actual mother could currently participate. The relationship is, accordingly, partial. The relationship is occurring in only one head. The relationship is, however, doing something useful. It is allowing me to feel, after the call, that something more substantive has happened than what actually happened. The feeling is not exactly true. The feeling is what allows me, by the end of the Sunday afternoon, to put the call down and move on with the rest of my week.
If I am being honest, I suspect my mother is doing something similar on her end. I suspect she has her own second-part conversation, in her own kitchen, in the twenty minutes after we hang up. I suspect she says, in her version of it, things she did not manage to say on the actual call. I suspect she hears, in her constructed version of me, things the actual me did not manage to say either. I cannot, of course, verify this. The second-part conversation is, by its nature, not shareable. But I would not be surprised, if we could compare notes, to find that we have been having parallel second-part conversations for years.
What I do not yet know how to do
The honest acknowledgment is that I do not yet know how to convert the second-part conversation into the first-part one. The conversion would require both of us to be more available in the first-part conversation than either of us currently knows how to be. The availability is the work. The work is, by this point in both of our lives, structurally difficult.
I do not, however, think it is impossible. The recognition that we are, in fact, having a two-part conversation is itself a small piece of new information. The information is that the first-part conversation has not been doing the work I had, on some level, been assuming it was supposed to do. The work has been getting done elsewhere, by me, alone, in my own head. The recognition opens the possibility, however small, that some of the second-part work could, eventually, be moved into the first-part conversation. Not all of it. Probably not even most of it. But some of it.
What I have been trying, in the last few weeks, is to introduce one or two slightly more substantive things into the actual call. A real question instead of an operational one. A small acknowledgment of something my mother has said that, in earlier calls, I would have glossed over. The introductions have been, by any external measure, modest. The introductions have also been, in some real way, the start of trying to make the first-part conversation slightly more like the second-part one. The first attempts have, predictably, been awkward. My mother does not yet have a clear sense of what I am doing. I do not yet have a clear sense of how to do it well. We are both, in some real way, in the early stages of trying to update a conversational protocol that has been running unchanged for forty years.
I do not know whether this will work. I do know that the second-part conversation has been doing real work, for years, and that the real work probably should not, for the rest of our remaining time together, be conducted entirely in my own head. The first-part conversation is what we have. The second-part conversation is what we have been making do with. The making-do has been functional. The making-do is also, on close examination, slightly insufficient. The work, going forward, is to see whether the first part can, slowly, take on some of what the second part has been carrying alone.
I have a call with my mother on Sunday. I will try, this week, to ask one slightly more substantive question than I usually ask. I do not know what will happen. The trying is, in some real way, the most honest piece of work I can currently do in this particular relationship. It is, also, probably overdue.
