A Long-Awaited Guest Blog Post by Avery M. Barr -- What I Need to Hear

If you owe my dad money, he will ask you for every last penny, literally, shamelessly. You will be taken aback at first, but when you look in his eyes you will not see greed or anxiety or any shadow of want. You will see an earnestness that is startling, like a golden retriever hoping to be petted. My dad is obsessed with getting what he paid for. He hates skim milk for that reason. Because why pay more money for less milk?

So what about me, Dad? Did you get what you paid for? 

Hard to say. He told me that adoption was my mother’s idea, so I doubt he had any expectations for me to subvert. I did well academically without being told. They let me quit piano when I didn’t want to do it anymore. When my mother was in home hospice (we didn’t talk much, mostly watched TV), the only thing she told me was that I should start dancing again, because she knew I had always loved it. From what I could tell, they only wanted me to be happy, whatever that means.

The only things they ever explicitly asked of me were to visit now and then and, mostly, to just listen to them talk on the phone. 

I honestly don’t remember what my conversations with my mother were like. I do recall her gossip, for instance the times she called to tell me that her best friend’s daughter was working in a BDSM dungeon in LA. She wasn’t one to talk to her friend (or anyone) about things directly, so she needed me to be the third-party listener I suppose. Lately I’ve noticed this tendency in myself, and I wonder if I have so many friends just so I can talk shit about one to the other in perpetuity.

My father on the other hand doesn’t gossip. He is more the type to tell you every meal he has eaten, with maddening enthusiasm. Every one of them was so good and so authentic and so...hot? He will also tell you every major and minor trip he has gone on, every activity, every book read, every movie watched. They were all great too, in spite of the fact I’ve never seen him stay awake through an entire one. He does not give any detail about these things, only to tell you they are great!...and you should check them out.

I know this all sounds like normal aging parent stuff, but it is absolutely crazy-making for me. I haven’t taken his calls all year, and in the past I have gone much longer without picking up. Moreover, I have struggled my whole life to explain this situation to people. Or, really I have barely even tried, because when I do, I end up feeling like there is something wrong or generally not-nice about me for being exasperated in the first place. He’s the most harmless guy in the world...what the hell is my problem? 

I will try to explain anyway.

Let me first tell you about my dad's younger brother, my uncle. He also loves to talk. If you accidentally find yourself on the phone with him, it is entirely possible to put it down (not on speaker) and walk away and do other things while he continues to narrate his day and go off on tangent after tangent. His kids (my cousins) have to instruct their friends when they come over that they can, rather have to, walk away from him mid-sentence, as this is the only way they can ever possibly escape his conversational orbit. He will barely notice, and therefore think no less of you, as he continues to chatter to himself. I think he may be the first person in history that phone solicitors hang up on, because he will talk to anyone for however long they can stand it. 

My dad is not nearly this extreme, but he is similar on all counts. He has gotten better about it, but it is for instance impossible to get him off the phone in a normal polite manner. If you say you have to go, this makes him to think of half a dozen more things he wants to tell you, like how the router in the living room isn’t working, or he’s thinking of going on another cruise, or how he just remembered he needs to buy more milk but the Publix isn’t open right now, or maybe the one on Abernathy is, which they remodeled recently but now the parking spaces are really narrow, and why do they do that when the lot is never full, oh!, and a new restaurant opened up in the spot next door, you know where the Chinese food place used to be...do you remember how good their pepper steak was? So authentic. That place was great. 

Their parents were both deaf. Their mother had scarlet fever when she was seven and their father had meningitis (I think) around the same age. They met at the New York School for the Deaf, though they could both speak well enough to be understood by non-deaf people, so none of their four children learned sign language. My uncle tells about how his baby sister would cry through the whole night unattended, and how later, when they were bigger, they would go around the house pretending to scream, just to rile up their mother. 

My dad is the oldest. It only just now occurs to me this means he didn’t have anyone to listen to him for the first three years of his life. Now, as an adult, the only thing he has ever wanted is a willing ear, anyone’s. It really doesn’t get more poetic than that.

The all-together logical, but still surprising, thing about all this is that he never demands or even seemingly expresses a preference for actually being heard. Distracted um's and uh huh's always suffice. He will keep leaving me voicemails, no matter how many months have passed since the last time I picked up the phone. He will never stop shouting into the silence. He seems blissfully unaware that there might be an alternative. 

Until recently, I was also unaware that I could be heard, though much less blissfully. I can’t really explain how it felt, because I didn’t have feelings about something I didn’t know existed, but I can tell you now that I acted like a ghost, and sometimes still do. If I say something and don’t get a response, whether in conversation or in telling a passing stranger to tie their shoe, I don’t repeat myself. I also feel almost continuously patronized, but barely ever speak up about it, at least not to the person doing the patronizing. Soliloquies make people (especially bosses and men) feel good about themselves, so I just let them happen. 

I am only now coming online to the fact that this bothers me, just like I only realized last year how much the whole “where are you from” thing bothers me, because it had never occurred to me before that it should. When I am somehow misunderstood, or literally not heard, apparently that’s when I’m supposed to try again and with a little more oomph this time. Alas, this is the point at which my brain usually falls out of my asshole, and rebuttal is thereafter a lost cause. I have a long way to go. 

Like a good adult, I’ve been practicing being a better listener for a long time, with highly mixed results. Now I’m finding that learning to be listened to is just as hard and much stranger. I'm generally afraid to give advice, but I have some field notes about this that I will address to you directly. 

For starters, to practice being listened to, small writing groups are ideal for beginners like me. It’s too easy to get swept away in someone else’s agenda in direct conversation, and asynchronous dialog is way too dramatic (e.g. long emails of grievances or poorly-worded social media comments). Screw whoever your listener (or so-called audience) is supposed to be, and let yourself work out what you have to say irrespective of them. 

Secondly, don’t listen to the endless exhortations to “find your voice,” especially if they only want your “authentic” voice. Ugh. As though you were blustering and inauthentic and the real you is tucked somewhere inside like a quarter in the lining of a purse. You’re not lost. You are as you right now as you ever will be. Stop searching for yourself and start looking for people who can listen to you, not just with their ears or their eyes but with their whole physical bodies and accumulated life experiences.

If you have never been comfortable being listened to before, like me, you will probably mess it up at first. You’ll either shrivel up and want to crawl into a hole, or you’ll nod and smile and pretend it felt good when maybe it didn’t feel like anything at all. You’ll mistake people with nice therapy voices and leaning-in postures as the right people, but really you can’t know who the right people are without a lot of trial and error and possibly a lot of discomfort.

Learning to be listened to can be disorienting. You might feel like a copy of a copy, like your words are coming from a body that isn’t yours. You won't trust anyone, especially if they are too kind. Then you will wonder if your reactions to others reactions are real or staged or downloaded from the people around you. You will think you don’t know and then be sure that you do and then swing back again in the space of a sentence. And you’ll come to find that you were alive before and after that sentence, so you’ll keep stringing them along one after the other, even when they intersect and go back on themselves over and over like a knot trying to describe itself with a straightedge. You will bounce off the limits of language and, with some luck, land in the arms of someone who is standing there at that same section of wall with you, in awe. 

The more you experience this, the more you learn to be listened to, the more you will find that you have real things you want to say.

This is important. It’s trite I know, but really, the world needs your voice. Whatever your story is, no one can tell it but you. And if you were adopted, aside from automatically having a blockbuster-worthy backstory, it is even more important. You are more strange and unique and fascinating than you realize. You are a radical simply by virtue of having a consciousness at all, and no one can speak more incisively about society and the edges of human experience that make the center of it more real than you can. 

The world needs to hear more of that. And even if it feels like it doesn’t, well then what I really want to say is that I do. I need fewer restaurant recommendations and more of you.

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For more of Avery's essays (and sometimes poems and reviews), visit Everything is in Retrograde on Substack: https://averymbarr.substack.com