what to call about when nothing is happening

the most common reason an adult kid skips a call to their mom isn't time. it's the feeling that there's nothing to report.

your week was fine. work was the same. you didn't get engaged, didn't quit your job, didn't have a baby, didn't move. you ate lunch. you sat in traffic. you watched something. you went to bed.

what's there to call about?

you don't need news. you need attention.

this is the reframe that fixes the problem. moms don't call you for news. they call you for attention. the news, when it exists, is just an excuse — a starting sentence that gives the call a shape.

if you wait until you have news, you're waiting to call your mom until your life produces a deliverable, which is a strange standard to apply to the closest relationship in your life. close people don't catch up on news. they sit in each other's days.

what your mom wants on the call is to be in your day for ten minutes. that doesn't require news. it requires the small, ordinary, sensory texture of your life — the stuff you're not used to thinking is worth mentioning.

starting point one: a sensory thing from today

look around. what does today actually consist of?

the weather. it finally stopped raining here. what you cooked or ate. i made eggs in the morning and they came out weird. a smell in the air. somebody on my block is burning leaves and it smells like october. a song stuck in your head. i can't stop humming that song from the supermarket. a noise. a light. something you saw on a walk.

this is the texture of a day. it's banal and it's exactly what a long-distance close relationship runs on. moms love sensory detail. they will follow you anywhere if you start with what your tuesday actually looked, sounded, or smelled like.

a sensory opener also has a useful side effect — it puts you in your own life for the call. you stop performing a report and start describing what's around you. the call becomes a small report from inside the day instead of a summary from above it.

starting point two: a question only she can answer

you have one source of information no other person on earth has — your mom is the world's leading expert on a few topics. her childhood. her parents. her family history. her recipes. the years before you were born. the stories about you that you don't remember.

most of this is locked behind the fact that you've never asked.

a question opener: what's a meal you remember your mom making? did you ever take a road trip with your sisters? what was your dad like when he was the age i am now? what did you do on weekends when you were twenty-five? what's a story about me you've never told me?

these questions do two things at once. they give the call a center of gravity that isn't your week. and they bank some of her stories before they're gone, which is a quietly important thing that you'll be grateful for later.

ask one. don't make it an interview. let her answer and then wander.

starting point three: a current small annoyance

this one is counterintuitive but reliable.

small annoyances are easier to share than wins. wins require a kind of performance — you have to tell the story in a way that lands, you have to handle being congratulated, you have to manage how much your mom is going to brag about it later. small annoyances are low-stakes. the dryer is making a weird noise. i'm in a small fight with my downstairs neighbor. i can't find my passport.

and small annoyances generate conversation in a way wins don't. she'll have a story about her own dryer. she'll have an opinion about the neighbor. she'll ask follow-up questions. the call has somewhere to go.

the trick is the small part. don't open with something big. i'm having a real crisis at work is not a starter; that's the middle of a different conversation. the coffee machine is dying and i hate the new one i bought is a starter. mundane is the point.

calls don't need agendas

put all three of these together and the takeaway is this. calls don't need agendas. they need a starting sentence.

once the call is going, it'll go. mom-call inertia is real and it works in your favor. you start with the dryer noise and twenty minutes later you've covered the dryer noise, her dryer, your sister's new job, dinner, the weather, and a question about the holidays. none of which you planned. none of which you needed to plan.

the starting sentence is the hard part. once you have it, the call writes itself.

so when you're standing in your kitchen at sunday morning and the reminder fires and the empty what would i even talk about feeling shows up — pick one of the three. a sensory thing. a question only she knows. a small annoyance. one sentence. press the green button.

nothing is happening. that's fine. call her about that.