Some parents have to worry about their child running off when they go out but when I was a kid I was practically stuck to my mother’s leg. Shy doesn’t begin to describe it. Even into my teenage years I would protest if I was sent into the shop alone to buy a loaf of bread. But answering the phone was the worst.
In the days before mobile phones my dad would get lots of work related calls to our home phone. Calls from staff, calls from clients. I never quite knew what the etiquette was and even if I did I had no desire to execute it. I got into a little trouble one day when I told my dad his friend, Dave had phoned for him but when he called Dave it transpired that I had gotten it wrong.
“Megan, did you not ask who it was?”
“No. He didn’t say and I thought it sounded like Dave.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked to speak to you so I went to get you and you said you’d call him back.”
“So what did you say to him?”
“I said ‘Daddy’s in the bathroom. He said he’ll ring you back.’”
My dad shook his head. “You can just say I’m busy. You don’t have to tell people I’m in the bathroom. Especially when you don’t know who it is!”
Mystery has never been my forte. I like clear communication and tend towards full explanations. I was just telling the guy the truth and I didn’t have the presence of mind to massage it. But when it was pointed out to me I could see why my dad was not crazy about the message I delivered.
Other people’s privacy is a tricky thing. Even the tiniest of family secrets are difficult to manoeuvre when you are trying to tell your own story and put your real self out into the world. I’m currently leading a group of brave souls through a month-long writing challenge and just a few days in some of them have already come up against this problem. Some of the pieces they are writing are being shared in our private Facebook group but not with the wider world because they reveal sensitive things about other people.
It’s almost impossible to share your story authentically without revealing something about the people around you. The difficult thing is that secrets rarely belong to one person. Sooner or later you’re faced with questions like, if your secret or your private thing impacts me in some significant way, whose story is that to tell?
How can we be loving and respectful and still speak the truth as we see it and as we lived it? There are no simple answers to questions like this but it has to involve being gentle with yourself and with the other. Being gentle and loving does not mean lying down, or hiding out, or denying your own truth to make someone else feel better. It does mean thinking before you speak and taking time to find the boundary that feels right.
