One of the stranger things about mediation is how often we start by talking about one thing and eventually realize we’re talking about something else entirely. Tuesday pickup is a disaster. Okay. Let’s talk about Tuesday. Except twenty minutes later, Tuesday is doing just fine. Tuesday was minding its own business. The actual problem has been happening for the last two years.
This happens all the time. Someone is frustrated because the other parent was fifteen minutes late. Someone didn’t respond to a text. Somebody signed a child up for something without asking first. The backpack didn’t make it back. The school sent an email and apparently only one person knew about it. There is now a heated discussion about a water bottle that, under normal circumstances, costs $14.99 in the Publix aisle nobody intended to walk down. And if we stay entirely focused on the water bottle, we’re probably going to miss the conversation.
Because sometimes the conversation is really, I feel like I’m always the last one to know. Or, I feel like every decision gets made before anyone asks me. Maybe it’s I’m tired of being the person who remembers everything, or Every time something changes, I feel like I’m expected to rearrange my life around it. Sometimes it’s even much simpler: I genuinely thought this was how we’d been handling it. That’s the conversation beneath the conversation.
It doesn’t mean the original issue isn’t real. If pickup isn’t working, we still need to talk about pickup. If information isn’t getting shared, that’s still something the two of you may want to address. And if we have somehow found ourselves in a legitimate dispute over a $14.99 water bottle, I am not above giving the water bottle its moment. But I’m also listening for what else is happening, because if Tuesday pickup is really the fifth version of I don’t know when plans change until the last minute, we can spend an hour designing the world’s most magnificent Tuesday pickup arrangement and still be right back here when Saturday soccer changes. Different day, same conversation.
This is where mediation gets interesting to me. People sometimes think my job is to help them compromise. You want A, they want B, everybody scoots toward the middle, we shake hands, and presumably inspirational music begins playing somewhere. That’s not really how I experience mediation. A lot of my job is figuring out what we’re actually talking about.
Someone says, They’re controlling. Okay, what happened? They changed the schedule. Okay, what changed? Pickup moved from five to six. Okay, what happens when pickup moves from five to six? Somewhere in that conversation we may discover that the hour itself isn’t particularly important; the problem is that the change happened without a conversation. Or maybe the hour matters very much because someone has to be at work. Or maybe there have been seventeen schedule changes in six weeks and this was simply the one that finally tipped the cart over. Those are three completely different conversations hiding inside the exact same complaint.
That’s why I ask follow-up questions. Not because I’m trying to prove anyone wrong or conduct an archaeological dig through your relationship. I’m trying to understand what matters about the thing you just told me. Sometimes the answer is surprisingly practical. Sometimes it’s emotional. Usually it’s some combination of both, because families are inconveniently made up of human beings.
And every once in a while, one person explains what has actually been bothering them and the other person looks at them and says, Wait. That’s what you’ve been upset about? I love those moments, not because everyone suddenly agrees, but because now we’re finally talking about the same thing. Understanding something and agreeing with it are not the same thing. You don’t have to agree with someone else’s concern for it to become useful information in the conversation.
That’s an important distinction because it’s very difficult to make a useful decision when two people are answering completely different questions. If one person thinks we’re deciding what time pickup should happen and the other thinks we’re deciding how schedule changes should be communicated, we can argue about 5:00 versus 6:00 until Publix stops making Pub Subs. We’re still not having the same conversation.
So sometimes we slow down and pull apart what actually happened, what part of it is creating the problem, whether this is one particular situation or something that keeps showing up in different forms, and what, if anything, actually needs to be decided. Occasionally, after all of that, we discover Tuesday really is just Tuesday. The pickup time doesn’t work. Fantastic. I love an uncomplicated Tuesday.
But other times, Tuesday was just where a much bigger conversation happened to land. Next month it might land on soccer practice. Then a birthday party. Then somebody forgets the backpack and here we go again.
The topic keeps changing, but the conversation underneath it hasn’t.
And until we figure out what that conversation actually is, we’re probably going to keep meeting it in different aisles.