Ol' Yeller and the Phoenix

I wrote on Facebook all but the "AB" line, below:

My son yelled to me across the house- I couldn't hear him. So I connected my bluetooth headset and called him. But I couldn't hear him. Guessing it was my headset, I disconnected and tried to connect again. My phone put up a message "Hit any key on the keyboard to connect" but it displayed no keyboard??? I dis- & re-connected a couple of times. Finally I switched to another headset. This time it worked. He said it was probably his phone.

This insistence on simplicity seems bad. It'd be nice if most apps had a "debug" button. For the phone, it'd show which microphone and speaker it was using and the sound levels for each, so if one's not hearing or being heard, it'd be clear where the problem was- receiving or hearing, transmitting or being heard...

The "Hit any key on the keyboard" message was just bizarre...

AB: I'm in the Camp that said yeller needs to walk across the house to speak in a normal tone. Forget electricity and connectivity.

You seem to be in the camp of commonly accepted social norms, in this case, interpreting his actions as meaning something about consideration and respect. Ol' yeller has his own gestalt suited to his own non-neurotypical make-up. I find that adapting and communicating work better than attaching myself to a position and making him wrong.

The result is workability and relationship, but at a cost. My highly judgmental ego doesn't get to be right. But it compensates by unnecessarily insisting its adaptation is now right...

(At times, I think my ego is really a phoenix, frequently dying but then rising from the ashes...)

I think I've had this realization, correcting my ego only to have it come right back, on average about once a day for the last 40 years...

I felt a bit guilty about answering her perfectly normal reply with such a long missive. I almost, but didn't, apologize and offer the following story:

When my son was little, he'd often ask question after question about how something worked- for hours. I grew tired of the challenge of answering questions piecemeal, plus the constant interruptions. I tried asking him what model he had in his brain that was prompting them, but he was too little...

So I began answering questions at length. If he asked, for instance why two electrons repel each other, I'd tell him all about electrons and their properties and how they acted, plus protons and neutrons, plus how the charge then created electric current, and about capacitance and the difference between AC and DC.

Instead of answering just the question, I tried to answer it in a larger context and then describe the context as a system with rich components and behaviors.

Typically, he'd listen closely for a few minutes. Then his brain would fill up and he'd go away.

My wife disapproved. She said one shouldn't do more that give a simple answer, so the child could work things out for himself.

My mother, on the other hand, was horrified. She thought the complexity was actually harming him.

I wasn't prone, I believe, to this sort of behavior, perhaps now called "mansplaining", earlier in my life.

But now I enjoy it, writing my thoughts. 'Yet another manifestation of ego.