I stopped rushing through phone calls with my parents and started letting the silences sit and the conversations went from five minutes to forty-five and I realized they were never boring—I was just never listening

Last Sunday, I hung up the phone after talking with my daughter and realized something had shifted.

What used to be our quick, efficient five-minute check-ins had become these meandering, beautiful conversations that stretched close to an hour. The change didn't happen because our lives suddenly became more exciting. It happened because I finally learned to stop rushing through the pauses.

For years, I treated phone calls with family like items on a to-do list. Call mom, check. Call dad, check. Sunday call with daughter, check. I'd fill every silence with another question, treat every pause like an emergency that needed immediate verbal CPR.

If the conversation slowed, I'd make my excuses and hang up, convinced we'd simply run out of things to say.

The discovery in the quiet spaces

Have you ever noticed how uncomfortable we've become with silence? We treat it like an enemy, something to be conquered or filled. During phone conversations, those quiet moments feel especially heavy, don't they?

Without facial expressions or body language to guide us, we panic. We assume silence means boredom, disconnection, or worse, that we have nothing meaningful to share with each other.

But here's what I discovered when I stopped treating silence like a problem to solve: those pauses are where the real conversations live. They're the spaces where my daughter gathers her thoughts before sharing something she's been mulling over. They're the moments where memories surface, where feelings find their words, where the superficial gives way to the substantial.

I think about my mother during her struggle with Alzheimer's, how our conversations became full of long pauses while she searched for words that increasingly eluded her. Back then, I learned patience out of necessity.

I had to sit with those silences because filling them would only confuse her more. What I didn't realize was that she was teaching me something I'd need long after she was gone: the art of waiting for what wants to be said.

Why we rush through the people we love most

There's this strange phenomenon where we give our best attention to strangers and acquaintances while rushing through conversations with the people who matter most.

We'll listen intently to a colleague's weekend plans but multitask through our mother's story about her garden. We'll engage fully with a new friend's relationship drama but half-listen when our father talks about his doctor's appointment.

I used to do this constantly. While my parents talked, I'd be mentally composing grocery lists, scrolling through emails, or worse, already planning my exit from the conversation. "Well, I should let you go," became my favorite phrase, as if I was doing them a favor by cutting things short.

The truth is, rushing through these calls was my way of avoiding the complexity of really connecting. Real conversation requires vulnerability. It demands that we show up fully, and showing up fully means confronting the passage of time, the changes in our relationships, the things left unsaid. Much easier to keep things surface-level and brief.

Learning to listen between the words

When I started letting our conversations breathe, something magical happened. My daughter began sharing not just what happened in her week, but how she felt about it. Instead of the bulletin points of her life, I got the texture, the color, the underlying emotions.

During one of those extended pauses, she suddenly said, "You know, Mom, I've been thinking about that time when..." and launched into a memory I didn't even know she carried. Another time, after a particularly long silence, she admitted she'd been struggling with a decision for months but hadn't known how to bring it up.

These revelations don't come in the first five minutes of a conversation. They don't arrive on schedule. They emerge slowly, tentatively, testing the waters to see if there's really space for them.

I think about my own parents, now gone, and how many of these deeper conversations we missed because I was always in such a hurry. How many stories went untold because I signaled, through my impatience with silence, that I didn't have time to hear them?

The practice of presence

Changing this pattern wasn't easy. Do you know how hard it is to break the habit of filling silence? That first Sunday when I decided to let the pauses exist, I literally had to sit on my hands to keep from reaching for my phone, from finding a distraction.

When my daughter went quiet, instead of jumping in with another question, I waited. And waited. The silence stretched, and just when I thought I couldn't stand it another second, she said, "Actually, there's something I've been wanting to talk to you about."

This practice of presence has rippled out into other areas of my life. I find myself listening differently to friends, to neighbors, even to myself. I've discovered that most of us are walking around with things we want to say but haven't found the right moment, the right listener, the right silence in which to say them.

In a previous post, I wrote about the five years of silence between my sister and me after a painful falling out. Looking back, I wonder if part of our problem was that we never knew how to sit with uncomfortable silences together.

We were so busy talking at each other, filling the air with our grievances, that we never created space for understanding to emerge.

Final thoughts

These days, when my phone rings on Sunday evening, I don't glance at the clock. I don't multitask. I settle into my favorite chair, take a deep breath, and prepare to really listen. Sometimes we talk for ten minutes, sometimes for over an hour.

The length doesn't matter anymore. What matters is that we're both fully there, letting the conversation unfold at its own pace, discovering each other anew in the spaces between words.

If you're reading this and thinking about your own rushed phone calls, your own impatience with silence, I encourage you to try something different next time. Let the pause extend a beat longer than comfortable. Resist the urge to fill it. You might be surprised by what emerges in that space, by who your loved ones become when given room to fully exist in your attention.