Friday, October 9

Call your parents first

Most men wait for the parent to call, then feel vaguely guilty about it.

Key takeaways

Call before the holiday forces the conversation
Ask one question about their life now
Hang up before you turn it into business

TL;DR

Most men wait for the parent to call, then feel vaguely guilty about it. Pick up the phone first, with nothing to report and nothing to fix.

Call with no agenda

There's a reason the dialing feels heavy. The call isn't hard because the relationship is bad. It's hard because you've been handling it instead of having it.

Drop the status report

Think about how those calls usually go. Work is fine. Kids are busy. Weather's weather. Twelve minutes of logistics and you both hang up having told each other nothing. That's not closeness. That's a shift change at a factory neither of you owns anymore.

So ask something real. What was the best part of their week. What they've been thinking about. What their own father was like at your stage of things. You'll get a pause on the line because nobody's asked them that in years.

a kitchen calendar with pen hanging beside it

Photo by Alan Jiang on Unsplash

Stop waiting for them to change

Some fathers won't open up. Some mothers will turn every call into a worry list. You don't get to pick the parent you got. You do get to pick whether you keep punishing them with distance for being who they've always been.

Calling first isn't surrender. It's deciding you'd rather be the one who reached out than the one who was right.

Today

Call a parent today with no agenda and ask one question about their life, not yours.

Go deeper

The command to honor father and mother comes with a strange tail on it. "Honor your father and mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you." Exodus 20:12 Long days in the land. Something about staying connected to the people who came before you keeps a man rooted where he actually lives.

Honor doesn't require that they earned it. It doesn't require that they were good at it. It asks you to keep the line open, because a man who cuts off his own history tends to float. Make the call. Even the short awkward one counts.