I was sitting at my desk writing when he called. It was a Tuesday, a few minutes before six — which meant he was just getting home. I saw his name on the screen and picked up immediately. That’s a rule I made a long time ago: if I can stop what I’m doing and take a call from my kids, I do. Real conversations only happen when they want to have them. If you miss the window and call back later, you get the distracted version. I learned that the hard way.
We talked for an hour and ten minutes.
About ten minutes in, he asked me something I wasn’t expecting.
“Mom — do you think deeply about stuff?”
I told him I might need a little more context on that question.
It had been about a week since I’d told him I was writing. Not just told him — I’d sent him the essay I wrote about him, asked if he was okay with me submitting it. He read it, gave me his blessing, and offered a few edits. So when that question landed, my brain went exactly one place.
He read it. He has an opinion.
I held my breath a little.
He meant physics.
“Like, do you think about why things work the way they do? Why the sky is blue? That kind of thing.”
I exhaled. Then I laughed. And then I told him yes, I do think deeply about things. Just not that way.
At work, we had a framework for performance reviews. Three pluses, three deltas. What went well, what to change. I spent thirty years running that exercise on projects and teams and quarterly results. What I never said out loud is that I’ve been running it on myself for just as long. Not on my career. On my kids.
Did I handle that right? What would I do differently? What am I so glad I didn’t miss?
I think deeply about my kids’ childhood. About the stories that live in me now that they’ve stopped being daily life, the moments I filed away without knowing I was filing them. I told him that. I said that’s actually why I like writing now — it’s how I find my way back into those stories, how I figure out what they meant.
He said “hm” in the way he does when something lands, and then he moved on to the economy.
No fanfare. No verdict. Just absorbed it and continued. Like his mother being a person who writes was simply a fact about her, the way the sky being blue is a fact about the sky.
We talked about politics. About where the country is headed and why it makes him angry. I told him what I’ve learned over thirty years of watching things I couldn’t control: at some point you have to stop letting it make you crazy. Not because it doesn’t matter. Because the rage costs more than it returns, and you only have so much to spend.
I don’t know if he heard that part. He’s 25. Some lessons you have to arrive at yourself.
Near the end of the call, I came back to his question.
“So, to answer what you actually asked me,” I said. “No. I don’t think deeply about black holes. I think deeply about how to make sure you and your sister are happy and can live your best life.”
He didn’t say much to that. He didn’t need to.
What he has said, not that day but once in Florida when we were all together, is that things are easier because he knows we’re there. That’s not nothing. That’s the whole answer, actually. That’s what thirty years of three pluses and three deltas gets you, if you aim them at the right things.
The sky is blue because of the way light scatters. I looked it up once. Understood it for about forty-five seconds and then forgot.
But I can tell you exactly what my son looks like when he’s working through something hard. I can tell you the moment I knew my daughter had figured out who she was. I can tell you the stories they don’t remember but I’ve kept anyway, the ones that will probably end up on this page eventually, one Monday at a time.
That’s my version of how things work.
That’s where I do my thinking.
The question he was asking and the question I heard were completely different. The answer turned out to be the same.
What question has someone asked you lately that sent your brain somewhere they didn’t expect?
If this landed somewhere true for you — share it with a woman who needs to read it. And come back next Monday. We’re just getting started. 🌿
If this is your kind of thinking too, these are from the same place:
I Scheduled Everything Except the Point
You picked up your phone. Not for any reason. Just because the quiet was too loud.
Is It Weird That I Actually Like My Husband?
Last February my husband and I went away for the weekend.
Love this - and 1000% agree about picking up the phone when they call because you might miss the moment. And I love your perspective on deep thinking. I think that's where I'm at these days with my empty nest life, too. Thank you for sharing this.
Thank you for sharing this. My children are still young (7 and 11) but sometimes the questions they ask catch me off guard in the best of ways. And I still talk to my mom on the phone every Sunday. Somewhere along the way we started talking on Sundays. Now we both carve out that time.