Laura invited me to come out and talk on the trampoline near midnight last night. I didn’t think we were likely to make much progress but I was willing to give it a shot. I’m not sure Laura had very high hopes either. She opened by complaining to me about how unreasonable it is of me to expect her to trust anything I have to say about parenting or to listen to what I have to say about what she should do. She was upset that I told her to observe Noelle’s treatment of me. The first part of the conversation played out as I had originally expected but I stayed calm and tried to answer her questions and let her barbs fly past me. Eventually we started actually communicating – perhaps because of my insistence that I wasn’t asking for any further acknowledgement from her about how damaging her attitude toward me was.
Whatever the case we eventually got to where I could describe and she could accept the fact that no matter what I did – good or bad – the decision to trust me would be a choice she would have to make based on faith. I also explained that the most helpful thing she could do was to choose to trust – that removing the anchor of skepticism would make it possible for me to perform closer to her highest expectations. By the time we were done we both felt like we had really connected and understood each other.
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