I’m busy not blogging this morning, so I thought I’d do it here. Not blogging has taken many forms already including a detailed description of a leaf in my notebook, a search investigation into the best blogging sites (?), writing  a poem about yesterday and the day before – I may get to that here – entering all the dates in my diary for a poetry course I’m attending which starts in October and discovering that some of the dates may be wrong, and emailing the course provider to check (no reply yet), what else, looking out of the window and not writing about it, talking on the phone, messaging, looking round to see what else I haven’t been doing… and so on. Oh, yes, thinking about going to the library, thinking about going out to lunch, thinking about going to the bank, thinking about blogging regularly, like every Tuesday – definitely not every Wednesday because this might then actually be it, though maybe that ship has sailed – and on and on and on.

It is all because, all this procrastination, because yesterday was very big day for me. Yesterday I spent some time waiting at the Custody Centre in Basingstoke. I chatted a bit to a man who was there to collect an impounded car. Daughter, I said, You win, he said. We laughed.

There is a possibility that yesterday was the first time I have really listened to my daughter. We had a plan, a family plan, that she should come and stay with me for a few days after I collected her. We all thought it was a good plan. She had other ideas. I attempted to change her mind and she explained why her idea was what she wanted to do. I got angry. I deliberately got lost, and we ended up in a Sainsbury car park. There then followed phone conversations with other family members to persuade her that our plan was a good one. When she spoke to her mother and her brother, going over her reasons, I listened. I had not listened when she spoke to me, but I listened now. I began to realise the importance of what she was saying. I began to change my mind. Talking to my partner Louise about this last night she remembered a quote from Alan Alda that had stayed with her over years – ‘Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.’

This is profound, and I did not come to the realisation willingly. I only came to it because I was sitting in the van listening to Ellen talk to other people, and they were delivering their arguments, and Ellen was going over the same responses, patiently, and not so patiently. I began to see the overwhelming strength of her arguments. I changed my mind.

So this is what I didn’t want to write about – being wrong! And realising that being wrong is not a bad thing at all. It is, hah, the wrong way to look at it. What matters is change. The preparedness to change, or, in this case, admitting that I have changed, even though I was not prepared to!

And there is what it must feel like for Ellen to actually be heard – maybe she will write that story herself sometime.