Tell Me More

Tell Me More will help you make everything, even the worst of times, go more smoothly by learning about a few useful phrases to habitually use come rain or shine.

Have you ever put together a puzzle? It’s hard knowing where everything goes until you get to the end. That is, unless you can’t find the last piece! Then it gets frustrating really quickly. In a similar way, it’s hard to see the people we care about suffer when we know what “missing piece” will fix their problems.

This is what Kelly’s friend Tracy says that trying to listen to children is like. We hate to see our children in pain, so we want to solve every problem by giving them that missing piece. But that’s not what our kids need. Their progression requires that they learn to figure some things out on their own. And the best thing we can do to help them with that is to listen.

As Kelly and Tracy were discussing this on a long car ride once, Kelly’s daughter Georgia called in tears. Although Kelly initially thought Georgia must have done something wrong, Tracy’s nudges helped Kelly to listen instead of being hard on Georgia.

It turned out that Georgia did just want someone to listen and affirm her feelings. With the guidance of Tracy, Kelly was able to help her daughter calm down by the end of the call.

Usually when something goes wrong, people know what they need to do. It’s not the advice that helps them. What most people need to get through it is someone to empathetically feel with them.

Do you remember the last time you told someone that you wouldn’t do something they wanted you to do? Saying no is easy when we’re children. But as we grow, somewhere along the way we learn to associate it with being selfish, mean, or lazy. That’s really disappointing, because for healthy relationships, saying no is vital. Kelly had a life-long goal of having four kids before she was 40. But when she got cancer, that threw everything in her life upside down. First, chemotherapy stopped her fertility. But to make matters worse, she then learned of a growth on her ovaries that required her to get them taken out. She was devastated. After dealing with the initial blow, Kelly found strength in considering alternatives to having more children. There was adoption or egg and embryo donors. All seemed right again until she shared all of this with her husband, Edward. In a crushing blow to Kelly, he explained that he was happy. In his world, he finally had a healthy wife. Their kids were happy and his career was flourishing.…