from: In Praise of Listening: A Gathering of Stories (Bauhan Publishing, 2023)
from: Chapter 1: CHILDREN LISTENING
Not Being Heard
It may well be that things are different now. But when I was a child, the grown-ups seemed to belong to another world entirely. They had their own culture and preoccupations, their own inscrutable jokes and anecdotes, their own way of drawing back and becoming utterly, unassailably, silent. I remember trying to work out what they really meant, beyond the laughter and the kisses and the charged emphatic welcome. Did Papa like that gruff man with the mustache? Was Mama actually interested in what the nice lady at the Post Office had to say? Or were they just pretending? It was hard to tell. I longed to translate those adult words and gestures back into my own vernacular, to get at what I thought of as “the truth.”
We were still at Coneybury when I began to ponder this, and there were four of us at home, ranging in age from seven and a half to barely two. It was as if we were in some way interchangeable, a litter of soft-haired, bright-eyed little creatures, lounging on the sofa or across the floor. Papa worked as a barrister in the city law courts, and we only ever saw him on weekends. Our mother, on the other hand, was almost always there. But there were groceries to order, letters to write, flowers to arrange and re-arrange. There were calls to make, dinner-parties to be planned. I think it was hard for her to see us as individuals, each with an equivalent center of gravity: dark with unexpected angers, rifted with sudden bursts of exaltation.
Only very rarely did she take the time we craved to sit and listen.
You can buy a copy of In Praise of Listening direct from me:
Let me know where to send it, and if you’d like it signed.
(See too my full list of publications, including World Enough & Time:
On Creativity and Slowing Down.)
You can also get it from my publisher: www.bauhanpublishing.com
or from your friendly local bookstore. My own favorite is Broadside Books in Northampton, MA, www.broadsidebooks.com.
On May 24, 2024, Christian was interviewed by Loan Tran for Awakin.