Speaking Different Languages
I’ve been having the same conversation with my mom for weeks. Not the exact same words. But the same conversation. If you’ve ever walked beside someone you love through a long illness, you probably know the kind I mean. The conversation changes a little every time, but underneath it, it’s asking the same question. How do we take care of the people we love now? For us, it’s my dad.
As his health has continued to change, I keep finding myself gently steering almost every conversation back to my mom.
“Are you eating?”
“Are you sleeping?”
“When was the last time you took a break?”
Every time, she lovingly redirects me.
“I’m fine.”
“What about Dad?”
“He’s the one we need to be thinking about.”
Round and round we go. Neither of us leaves those conversations angry… A little frustrated. Definitely emotional. But never angry. Because underneath every disagreement is something we’ve never questioned. We both love him. We both love each other. We simply keep arriving at different conclusions about what love looks like right now.
For the longest time, I thought we just saw the situation differently. Then my brain did what it always seems to do. It wandered.
My brain has always been a little bit of a collector. It picks up random ideas, carries them around for a few days, and then, usually when I’m doing something completely unrelated, decides to connect the dots. It’s one of my favorite things about myself… and occasionally one of the most exhausting.
This time, those dots somehow landed me in an Instagram rabbit hole. One Five Love Languages quiz turned into revisiting my Enneagram, briefly convincing myself numerology might actually know something, and spending far more time than I’d like to admit letting Instagram explain my personality.
I wish I could tell you this is unusual behavior for me. It isn’t. Then my results popped up. I laughed out loud. Honestly, I don’t think anyone who knows me would’ve been surprised.
Physical Touch.
Acts of Service.
Of course. If I love you, there’s a pretty good chance I’m already walking toward you with my arms open before we’ve even finished saying hello. And if you tell me you’re struggling, my brain has probably already started making a mental checklist before you’ve even finished your sentence.
Who do I know that could help?
What resource would make this easier?
How do we fix it?
My family has spent years laughing about the number of stray dogs and cats I’ve “rescued.” Although, if you ask them, they’ll quickly point out that somehow they always ended up being the ones taking them home. They’re not wrong. Apparently, I’ve never met a problem, or a stray animal, I didn’t want to help.
But somewhere between laughing at my quiz results and scrolling to the next completely unnecessary personality test, another thought quietly worked its way in. Maybe my love language isn’t just the way I receive love. It probably includes the language I instinctively speak when I’m trying to care for someone else.
Once that thought found me, I couldn’t seem to shake it. I found myself replaying conversations with my mom. Only this time, I wasn’t just hearing the words. I was listening for the language underneath them. I realized we weren’t disagreeing because one of us loved more. We were disagreeing because we love differently.
My instinct has always been to widen the circle because somewhere in my mind I’ve always believed that if enough people are caring, no one has to carry everything alone. When someone I love is struggling, I immediately start looking around the room.
Who else needs support?
How do we make this sustainable?
What can we put in place now that will help everyone six months from today?
My mom’s instinct is entirely different. She narrows the circle until it contains exactly one person. Like caring for my dad.
And then there’s my brother. He’s the one who somehow always knows exactly when the room needs to laugh. It doesn’t matter if we’re sitting on the couch talking about something hard or everyone has become just a little too serious. Without fail, he’ll throw out some perfectly timed smart-ass comment about my outfit, tease my mom about something she just said, or find the one observation that catches all of us completely off guard. Suddenly we’re laughing.
The conversation breathes again.
I had never really thought about that as an act of love before. But it is. It’s his way of taking care of us.
And that’s when it really hit me. Maybe I’ve spent much of my life recognizing care only when it looked like mine. My mom has been caring all along. My brother has too.
They’ve just been speaking different languages.
It didn’t change my opinion. I still want my mom to take care of herself. I still believe caregivers deserve someone caring for them, too. I still hope she’ll let us shoulder more of the weight. None of that changed.
What changed was the way I listened.
Instead of hearing resistance…
I started hearing devotion.
That doesn’t mean we’ll suddenly agree. I’m sure we’ll have this conversation again. Probably more than once. But I have a feeling I’ll hear it differently. Maybe that’s true in more places than just my family. Maybe they’re speaking a language we’ve never learned to recognize. Not because they care less. But because they’re expressing care in the way that’s been quietly shaping them their entire lives.
I clicked on an Instagram quiz expecting five minutes of harmless entertainment. Instead, it quietly changed the way I listen.
Not changing someone’s mind.
Just changing the way we hear their heart.
