When I was a teenager, I remember being at a friend’s house and calling home to ask my mom if I could spend the night. When I hung up the phone, the girl I was with looked really confused.
“What?” I asked her.
“Wasn’t that your mom?” She pointed to the phone mounted on the kitchen wall.
“Yeah, why?”
“You didn’t tell her that you loved her before you hung up.”
“And?” I asked, mirroring her confusion.
“Aren’t you, like, supposed to do that?”
For both of us, it was one of those moments that you have as a kid when you realize that other families do things differently than yours. It was like the moment that I realized that some families ate asparagus, and some families even ate asparagus without blessing it first. Some families put ice in their milk, and some parents let their kids watch Married With Children. It’s not a moment of judgment; it’s simply an epiphany that the world exists differently in other homes than it does in your own and has for many years.
After this experience, I started to notice that most of my friends would mutter, “I love you too,” before saying goodbye. No matter how short or trivial the conversation was, if they were talking to their parents, brother, sister, they always said either, “I love you,” or “I love you, too,” before hanging up.
In college, I noticed it even more because there was less privacy, more cell phones, and more calls made home to parents than before. If I was feeling nosy, but also trying to be slick about it, I could just wait until the end of the phone call. The possibilities of who was on the other line shrunk significantly if the call ended with an, “I love you (too).”
My family doesn’t do this. We hardly ever say, “I love you” at the end of a phone call. My dad does more than anybody, but it’s not every time we hang up the phone. On certain occasions we do, but not usually. Maybe if there has been a death in the family or if it’s been a particularly terrible day, or good day for someone. Birthdays, holidays, or any other milestone day. When I first realized this, I actually got a little sad. It made me worry that my family couldn’t communicate or that we weren’t able to express our feelings for one another. But that couldn’t be it. In my entire life, there has not been one single day when I didn’t know that my parents loved me more than anything in this world.
But I started to pay attention more to how I ended my phone conversations with my family. Usually my parents tell me to, “be careful.”
“Alright honey. Well, I hope the rest of your day/week is good. Be careful.”
“I will.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
Even if I wasn’t going anywhere it was always “be careful.” Even if I was going somewhere like the grocery store. “Be careful.” I used to come back with snarky little comments. “Sure, I’ll be careful at the grocery store. You never know when you might get T-Boned by another cart on the juice aisle. Especially on Tuesday when there’s a senior citizen discount. Everybody's got cataracts and there's all those motorized scooters darting around the place…”
(Eventually the joke got old and I just stuck to saying “I will.”)
My family has always been careful people. My dad has spent enough money on health insurance, car insurance, home insurance, renter’s insurance, and life insurance to travel to at least 30 foreign countries. Maybe it’s a simple case of self preservation or maybe it’s just a fear of failure, but my family has never been very adventurous. We never went white water rafting, skiing or camping together (and I’m not saying this regretfully AT ALL). Our family vacations were always safe trips to North Myrtle Beach or Asheville. When I considered all this, I just assumed that my family’s habit of saying “be careful” at the end of a conversation was a symptom of our over-cautious natures. But earlier this year, I realized that “Be careful” meant something more.
I was at the hospital visiting my Grandpa who was recovering from some surgery earlier this year. As my mother and I left the hospital room, my Grandpa called out to us with so much tenderness in his voice, “Be careful!” And my mom called back, “You too.”
He was actually saying “I love you,” and my mother was saying “I love you, too.”
After I understood this, I started paying attention and realized that my family says “I love you,” all the time. When my mom, dad, grandpa, brother, aunt, etc tell me to “be careful,” what they are actually saying is “be careful because I love you.”
I’m glad that my family doesn’t use “I love you” all of the time. If you use a word too much, it can lose its power (a lesson I learned when I had my driver’s permit and my mother, who considered "crap" to be a very bad word indeed, told me I was going too effing fast…you better believe I slowed down). My family is not perfect, but both of my parents have done a wonderful job of showing me how much they care, even without telling me that they love me every time we hang up the phone or go our separate ways. I already know it. They’ve shown me this every day for the past 27 years.
It’s Christmas today, and it’s the first white Christmas we’ve had in the Piedmont of North Carolina that I can remember. Despite the cold weather, I’ve been feeling pretty warm the last few days that I’ve spent with my family. And today when I left my mom’s house to drive through the wet snow back to my empty apartment, my mom hugged me and told me to “be careful out there.”
I smiled and said, “you too.”
“What?” I asked her.
“Wasn’t that your mom?” She pointed to the phone mounted on the kitchen wall.
“Yeah, why?”
“You didn’t tell her that you loved her before you hung up.”
“And?” I asked, mirroring her confusion.
“Aren’t you, like, supposed to do that?”
For both of us, it was one of those moments that you have as a kid when you realize that other families do things differently than yours. It was like the moment that I realized that some families ate asparagus, and some families even ate asparagus without blessing it first. Some families put ice in their milk, and some parents let their kids watch Married With Children. It’s not a moment of judgment; it’s simply an epiphany that the world exists differently in other homes than it does in your own and has for many years.
After this experience, I started to notice that most of my friends would mutter, “I love you too,” before saying goodbye. No matter how short or trivial the conversation was, if they were talking to their parents, brother, sister, they always said either, “I love you,” or “I love you, too,” before hanging up.
In college, I noticed it even more because there was less privacy, more cell phones, and more calls made home to parents than before. If I was feeling nosy, but also trying to be slick about it, I could just wait until the end of the phone call. The possibilities of who was on the other line shrunk significantly if the call ended with an, “I love you (too).”
My family doesn’t do this. We hardly ever say, “I love you” at the end of a phone call. My dad does more than anybody, but it’s not every time we hang up the phone. On certain occasions we do, but not usually. Maybe if there has been a death in the family or if it’s been a particularly terrible day, or good day for someone. Birthdays, holidays, or any other milestone day. When I first realized this, I actually got a little sad. It made me worry that my family couldn’t communicate or that we weren’t able to express our feelings for one another. But that couldn’t be it. In my entire life, there has not been one single day when I didn’t know that my parents loved me more than anything in this world.
But I started to pay attention more to how I ended my phone conversations with my family. Usually my parents tell me to, “be careful.”
“Alright honey. Well, I hope the rest of your day/week is good. Be careful.”
“I will.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
Even if I wasn’t going anywhere it was always “be careful.” Even if I was going somewhere like the grocery store. “Be careful.” I used to come back with snarky little comments. “Sure, I’ll be careful at the grocery store. You never know when you might get T-Boned by another cart on the juice aisle. Especially on Tuesday when there’s a senior citizen discount. Everybody's got cataracts and there's all those motorized scooters darting around the place…”
(Eventually the joke got old and I just stuck to saying “I will.”)
My family has always been careful people. My dad has spent enough money on health insurance, car insurance, home insurance, renter’s insurance, and life insurance to travel to at least 30 foreign countries. Maybe it’s a simple case of self preservation or maybe it’s just a fear of failure, but my family has never been very adventurous. We never went white water rafting, skiing or camping together (and I’m not saying this regretfully AT ALL). Our family vacations were always safe trips to North Myrtle Beach or Asheville. When I considered all this, I just assumed that my family’s habit of saying “be careful” at the end of a conversation was a symptom of our over-cautious natures. But earlier this year, I realized that “Be careful” meant something more.
I was at the hospital visiting my Grandpa who was recovering from some surgery earlier this year. As my mother and I left the hospital room, my Grandpa called out to us with so much tenderness in his voice, “Be careful!” And my mom called back, “You too.”
He was actually saying “I love you,” and my mother was saying “I love you, too.”
After I understood this, I started paying attention and realized that my family says “I love you,” all the time. When my mom, dad, grandpa, brother, aunt, etc tell me to “be careful,” what they are actually saying is “be careful because I love you.”
I’m glad that my family doesn’t use “I love you” all of the time. If you use a word too much, it can lose its power (a lesson I learned when I had my driver’s permit and my mother, who considered "crap" to be a very bad word indeed, told me I was going too effing fast…you better believe I slowed down). My family is not perfect, but both of my parents have done a wonderful job of showing me how much they care, even without telling me that they love me every time we hang up the phone or go our separate ways. I already know it. They’ve shown me this every day for the past 27 years.
It’s Christmas today, and it’s the first white Christmas we’ve had in the Piedmont of North Carolina that I can remember. Despite the cold weather, I’ve been feeling pretty warm the last few days that I’ve spent with my family. And today when I left my mom’s house to drive through the wet snow back to my empty apartment, my mom hugged me and told me to “be careful out there.”
I smiled and said, “you too.”
well said. Be careful little sister. JPK
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