On showing curiosity and tenderness in our conversations

How can we keep the conversation warm when we're separated by time zones and shape shifting family dynamics.

Ilkley Tarn, Saturday 23 November 2024.

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”
― Edith Sitwell

Hello dear readers, how are you?

I’m writing this from my desk at home looking out at snow covered branches. Our plans for the day upended thanks to Storm Bert and a second, much heavier, snowfall of the week that’s left our town looking pretty but roads impassable.

We were meant to be wandering around a sixth form in Leeds with our 15-year-old daughter today but I’m using this time to write instead. This change of plan isn’t unwelcome as it coincides with London Writers Salon 24-hour writing sprint.

I’m on my fourth (or is it fifth) hour of the sprint (with breaks) since it kicked off last night, and as long as we have enough milk to keep the Yorkshire tea flowing, I’ll be here scratching my head and writing for the rest of the day.   

This week I celebrated my one-year anniversary of working at Oliver Bonas (a six-week experiment that’s gone on for a lot longer), hit my 150-day Spanish streak on Duolingo, and spotted that I’ve published 50 Gently Does It posts. I answer ‘I’m good’ when I meet friends for dinner on Thursday evening and I am, but there’s something simmering under the surface that I can’t quite articulate but have tried to in this post.

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Pausing the writing, but not for too long

I didn’t send out a post last week, the words were stubborn, not wanting to leave my head and take their place on the page. I took it as a sign that I needed to pause, but I’m wary of pausing for too long because I know how much easier it is to slip out of a writing phase than it is to build one up.

I’ve enjoyed writing and sharing these posts, especially the comments and connections that have followed. That’s what I don’t want to lose, the connection with you, the reader.

I think a big part of this brain freeze is in no small part down to this time of year. My body craves warmth and soft edges. Time on the sofa binge watching Eddie Redmayne in The Day of the Jackal and going back to Virgin River on Netflix.

Alongside the usual day to day life and work juggles there was the trip to Cardiff a few weeks ago that I wrote about in ‘Nine years later’ and followed a few weeks later by my brother visiting us from Japan for the first time in three years.

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Nine years later...

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As a sibling group of four time spent in each other’s presence is in short supply these days. We’re more used to WhatsApp messages and phone calls and there’s something so very different about being with someone, especially in their home.

It’s like seeing each other with a different lens. Quirks and foibles are so much harder to hide when meeting at the sink, filling the kettle with water first thing in the morning, all sleepy eyed and clad in dressing gowns.

No perfectly timed, ‘I need to get ready for work’ escape route as on the phone, or leaving WhatsApps unread while you think of a reply and then forget to reply at all.

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Separated by timezones

One of the many reasons I loved living in Bath for those 13 years we were there was because we were located at a convenient stopping off point between my brother, and sister and her daughters in London, and my parents and other sister in Cardiff. We were also just down the road from my husband’s Bristol-based family.

A family home where the door was open to visitors was always in my sketched out picture of the adult future I envisaged when I was younger.

Close enough for regular day trips, it gave us a comfortable rhythm to lay above the syncopated beat of phone calls. The need for ‘state visits’ where mismatches between expectation and reality might lead to tension was minimised. The six of us (I’m the youngest of the four children) rumbled along quite happily, I think. We were connected in a way that felt familiar and comfortable.

Now though, we four siblings are separated by hundreds, thousands of miles, time zones and we don’t have mum or dad to steer or bind us. It’s down to us now.

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Tokyo, Cardiff, Somerset and Yorkshire as seen through a Zoom screen

The first Sunday in March 2020 after we went into lockdown, the four of us arranged to have a chat on Zoom at 11am GMT and declared it such a success we agreed to meet every Sunday morning thereafter at 11am UK time, 8pm Tokyo time.  

Through those little squares we were gifted glimpses into each other’s everyday lives, as abnormal as those lives were given we were in lockdown. My brother with views of Tokyo tower from his living room windows. My sister in Cardiff with her husband’s family grandfather clock standing to attention behind her. My other sister in her converted chapel in Somerset, carrying her coffee cup and the coffee pot to the table and bench that sit beneath the choir loft. And me in this navy walled office in Yorkshire.

These conversations were light. We laughed. We exchanged books we were reading, TV programmes and films we’d watched. We checked in with each other, the more we chatted, the more open we could be with each other. It felt like we were weaving new connections.

Picking up conversational threads

We picked up conversational threads week to week and as lockdowns shifted in each of our countries and the world gradually opened up, we flexed and kept up with each other as best we could.

We’d connected as a family group in a far more relaxed way than we had done since mum, grandma and dad’s deaths in 2015. We weren’t having to navigate our way through funerals, wills and probate. We’d had time to retreat to grieve and to start building new lives. These Sunday morning calls were a chance to reconnect afresh. One of those strange positives to come from that time.

Incredibly I think we kept these lockdown conversations going for more than a year, but somewhat inevitably the calls lost their weekly rhythm and petered out as our individual worlds opened up again. Somewhere along the line our WhatsApp group pinged less often too, bar the occasional flurry of messages when one of us goes on holiday .

About three or so years ago we met as a four in a pub behind Marble Arch for lunch when my brother was in the UK for a visit. I’m not sure of the exact date or month or even year. There was a photo, but I can’t find it now. We ate and chatted before wandering over to Marylebone and popping into the Wallace Collection, around the corner from where he used to live in London.

We haven’t met since though, and we won’t meet as a four during this visit. We just can’t get it to work what with work schedules, planned holidays and living in different corners of England and Wales. So we meet individually.

‘Families are in constant flux, which is why they are so complicated and why they are such hard work….at times families need to pull together, and at others to step back. It is this dance – the moving in and out as a family, seeking harmony while allowing for differences – that supports stability.’
Julia Samuel, Every Family Has a Story

Less than 48-hours to reconnect after a three year gap

My brother and I have 48 hours to reconnect up here in Yorkshire during his visit to the UK and as I park up and walk to the train station, I spot him getting off the Leeds train. I recognise him immediately, walking along the platform. Hands in his pockets, rucksack on his back.

I’d wondered if he’d changed, if I’d recognise him. Had he cut his lockdown hair? I needn’t have worried. I instinctively recognise his gait and the slight frown of concentration on his face before he sees me.

As he walks towards me the word ‘curious’ pops into mind. I’d been chatting to a friend earlier in the day who’d suggested approaching these tender conversations with curiosity (I love the reframing of conversations as tender, as coined by Dr Kathryn Mannix in her book Listen).

Curious feels good, it feels light, open.

Back home and sitting in the kitchen it feels easy, like old times. We talk about his stay so far in the UK and the rugby matches he’s been to at Twickenham. We talk about where he’s stayed and who he’s seen. I ask how it feels to be back. It strikes me how much his mannerisms remind me of our uncle, other times dad.

I chat about the children, work and home life and I hope I’m keeping it curious and light enough to give us threads we can spot and later pull on.

Reconnecting needs time together as well as time apart but sometimes it’s enough to simply see each other, even if it is for a short period. I’m conscious of the conversations we’re not having, but on reflection may be having time to simply hug, to look each other in the eye and walk down the hill to La Stazione and sit at a corner table chatting over a coffee and panini is enough.

Ducks on ice, Writing Hours time & it's 8am in Rio de Janeiro, it's a hat, hood and roll neck kinda day here and wise words from Julia Samuel

A shape shifting family brings new dynamics

There’s a layer of guilt I feel when I think about our move to Yorkshire in 2017, as necessary as that move was given the redundancy and lack of a job down south. I was acutely aware of and felt guilty for inflicting this disruption on the children. I was also aware of the impact it would have on my relationship with my family. After those years in Bath, we were now removing ourselves physically at least from the family.

The shape of our family changed irrevocably when mum and dad died in 2015. The year after they died my brother left London for Japan, a year later my sister left London for Somerset and a few months after her move, we left Bournemouth for Yorkshire. My eldest sister married her husband but happily for us all, they remained in the same corner of Wales, offering us some sort of stability and constancy.

Day trips to see each other have became a thing of the past, for me at least. My sisters can still manage it but any visit involving me now entails complex logistical and diary juggling and a minimum of five, more like six hours travel each way.

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Learning to stretch emotionally and create time to cool down

I know from living with chronic fatigue over the past decade (even though I consider myself ‘better’ now) that emotional and mental fatigue can be way more debilitating than physical fatigue. Twice weekly HiT sessions might make my quads and hamstrings ache but I know to stretch those muscles if I want to avoid DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness).

I need to learn how to warm down and stretch emotionally.

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This, dear reader, is what I wanted to write last week but it’s taken a few attempts to get it to this point. I’m also aware that I’m writing this live as it were, and that friends and family do read this. I write - I hope - from a point of reflection and observation, not judgement.

‘My parents have died. While I have been writing this book my love for and understanding of them have changed and grown. They live in me, continually shaping and influencing me, as do all our key relationships.’
Julia Samuel, Every Family Has a Story

This quote above from Julia Samuel sums up why I write, or rather what I get from writing. There’s the catharsis of writing Morning Pages that serves me so well but there’s something about pulling on these threads, writing it down and sending it out into the world that is also incredibly enriching, I hope it connects with you too in some way.

Thank you as always for reading, I’m hitting send on this post now before I tinker anymore with it. Time for these words to fly out of my head and into the world.

Harriet