I was three laps into a walk around my neighborhood, rehearsing the same conversation in my head for what felt like the tenth time, when it landed on me: I could not remember the last time my mother-in-law and I had actually talked. Not texted. Not traded logistics. Talked. Somewhere in the last few months, without either of us deciding it, the conversation had gone quiet, and an elephant had wandered in and made itself at home.
Where am I?
If you read my first post, you already know the shape of this season. My mom has needed a lot of me lately, my skills, my time, my whole self some weeks, and I am grateful for every hour of it, even the hard ones. But a season like that comes with a cost, and the cost is that something else always gets set down. For me, that something was my relationship with my mother-in-law.
We have always worked hard to communicate well with each other, and I am genuinely proud of that. But when life gets loud on one side of the family, the quiet side does not stay quiet for long. Decisions started getting made without checking in first. I noticed myself defaulting to “I guess we’ll just agree to disagree” instead of actually saying what I meant. That is not communication. That is two people being polite around an elephant.
What do I bring?
Before I could say anything useful, I had to sit with myself first. That took longer than I expected, and it looked less like insight and more like laps around my block, asking myself honestly why a decision or a comment had bothered me the way it had.
Years ago, early in my corporate career, I went through a training called Crucial Conversations, and I leaned on it hard here. Not because a conversation with someone I love should feel like a professional skill I am applying, but because it works. It gave me language for saying the hard thing without attacking the person I was saying it to. Was it easy? Not even a little. Do I wish one of us had said something sooner? Absolutely. But we sat down, laid out what had been building, and named it out loud instead of letting it keep collecting dust between us.
How do I move forward?
The part that actually moved us forward was not the conversation itself, it was what came after: asking each other to genuinely stand in the other’s shoes for a minute. Easier said than done, because not everyone walks into a conversation carrying the same history I do. We are both bringing our own history, our own backstory, our own baggage to the table, every time.
So here is my small, concrete next step: I am not waiting for the next crisis to check in. We are keeping the conversation going now, in the calm, so that if life ever asks another drop and run of me, the relationship is not what gets dropped. It is the good, ordinary times together that build the trust that carries you through the rocky ones.
If you are sitting in your own version of this, here is what I would gently offer: look at the relationships that have gone quiet while you were busy keeping something else alive. They are not broken. They are just waiting for you to pull up a chair.
A question for you
When the elephants start stacking up in your own relationships, how do you invite them to the table?
Come sit with me in the space between. Loose Ends lands every Wednesday. Real talk from the unfinished, one honest moment at a time.
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