The Adult OverSharer
About ninety percent of my waking hours are spent in the company of children. I know and understand children. Children overshare. Whether it is a detailed soliloquy of their latest trip to the bathroom or a brutally honest assessment of my new outfit (it apparently wasn’t doing me any favors) kids give you the straight dope. It’s expected.
What is unexpected, and very jarring, is the ADULT OVERSHARER. We all know the type: the person you have only met once or twice that jumps from pleasantries to the most intimate details of their lives in a single bound.
My recent run-in with this strange and exotic being came in the car pick-up line at my kids school. If it is a nice day, I will park the car in the line and my toddler and I will take a walk around the baseball fields while we await the end of the school day and the mass exodus of children from the building. As my son and I were taking our walk, I happened to see the mother of a girl in my daughter’s class walking with her son. Saying I am “acquainted” with this women would be a bit of a stretch. Our daughters are friends so we are aware of the others existence. The previous week we had both chaperoned a field trip and I had spoken to her for a grand total of four minutes. Which is to say I finally learned her first name and the names of her children.
She seemed nice enough and our sons’ were immediately curious about one another so we stopped and began the conversational give-and-take of parents thrown together by circumstance…or so I thought.
It began innocently enough. We chatted about the previous week’s field trip, the unseasonably warm weather and our upcoming weekend plans. Our daughters are both in first grade and I needed a quick reminder of her older daughters year. I was informed her older daughter was in seventh grade. Then I was given an immediate follow-up that her older daughter is not the daughter of her current husband but rather an ex-husband whom she married when she was too young.
While processing this information, I was then smacked over the head with the knowledge that her older daughter is an “IVF Child” as her and her first husband had difficultly conceiving. The hits just kept on coming as it was apparently necessary for me to know that kids number two and three are the product of her and husband number two and they were conceived totally naturally. I GUESS HER AND HUBBY #2’s parts just complimented one another in a way her and Hubby #1 just did not.
If I have not been clear, prior to this conversation I had said less words to this woman than appear in the current post I am writing. I was given this hurricane of information after asking the question “in what grade is your eldest child?” Is it me or was this information dump a bit excessive? Obviously it’s nothing to be embarrassed about but perhaps it could have waited until we knew each other slightly better? I don’t know the conception statistics of most of the people I speak to on a daily basis and I am quite fine with that.
Later in the day as I was sharing this story with my wife over a cup of tea (just as the Golden Girls did at the end of a long day) I got to thinking that perhaps this woman is on to something. What is wrong with being completely open and direct with others? Instead of fake conversation about the weather and what after school activities we were heading to, she decided to break right through my “polite society, fake chit-chat” walls and have a real conversation.
She felt no shame or embarrassment in sharing any of these topics and it actually led to a fulfilling conversation. Her openness brought up an openness in me and I found myself telling her how it took my wife and I a few tries to have our third child. We encountered some miscarriages and weren’t sure if we were up for going down the IVF route. Fortunately, nature took its course and our son came about naturally but that is not something I would have divulged had this person not been so direct with me.
I am a person who does not typically open up until I get to know someone. I would assume most people are the same. That is why I was so taken aback with someone being so forthright about the good and bad of their life over a two minute conversation.
I often rant about how hard it is for adults to make friends. Is it because we are so focused on following the “unspoken rules of adult conversation” where we reveal as little about ourselves as possible and instead focus on stupid, superficial topics? Someone being so honest with me knocked me off balance…..but in a good way.
It was nice to get to know someone, really get to know them. Not just whether their kids play soccer or what they are having for dinner that evening. I probably will not cross paths with this person again for months but they have certainly given me something to think about in how I approach adult relationships. While I am not sure I can be as honest and direct as her, perhaps I need to lower the mask a bit more and let people get to know real things about me…not just my take on the school’s Christmas play.
