Too Quiet

Too Quiet

The rules of physics shift when we become parents.  Somehow the airwaves change and we are suddenly tuned in to sound in a new way.  Noise is now a thing we both fear and crave.

A  baby can scream non-stop for two hours from colic or exhaustion or teething, fraying every nerve in your body until you make unholy bargains with the devil for some quiet.  When he finally falls asleep and that blessed quiet falls upon the house, the crazy sets in.  Now your radar is super-tuned to the static of the baby monitor.  He doesn’t usually sleep this soundly.  It’s awfully quiet in there.  You quiz your spouse:  do you think it’s too quiet? You ninja-creep into his room and hold a finger under his nose:  is he breathing?

With age, the noise increases, especially if siblings are in the mix.  I can scream louder than you.  No, I can!  Then eardrums are no longer a thing, and it’s worse than having spent three hours at an Iron Maiden concert.  It’s an endless barrage of questions, singing, yelling, and fighting. On the way home from an afternoon of errands, I used to tell my kids “Mommy’s ears are tired!  Let’s let them rest for 5 minutes!”  Who do you think invented the Quiet as a Mouse game?  A mom.

But you don’t want them to be quiet either.  You know the kind of quiet I mean.  A friend of mine foolishly relished a few extra minutes of sleeping in one morning.   Her rambunctious toddler twins were unusually quiet.  She got up to find they’d emptied five pounds of flour all over the kitchen and living room and were gleefully driving their trucks through the paths of “snow” they’d made.

Quiet does not bode well.  Quiet means smearing the contents of their diaper all over the crib and walls.  Quiet is eating the cat food, cutting their own hair with great concentration, dropping your earrings in the toilet one by one.  If siblings are involved, quiet gets more interesting:

https://youtu.be/xt2crfRgvYQ

My older sisters quietly devised a fun game one afternoon while my mother made dinner.  The oldest had to capture the younger two in a cowboys-and-Indians charade.  She found the first sister, tied her hands and feet and added a gag and blindfold for good measure. She ordered her to stay put while she went off to find her other quarry.  As the bossy first-born, she expected her instructions to be followed and didn’t think it important to tell the prisoner that she’d been stationed at the top of the stairs.  Like any self-respecting prisoner, the first sister attempted escape:  hop, hop, CRASH, TUMBLE, CRASH!  She landed at the bottom of the stairs with her knee through the drywall, the other two sisters staring wide-eyed from the top of the stairs, and my mother incredulously trying to make sense of the scene as she rushed around the corner.  On the upside, they learned from my father how to patch drywall.

As tweens and teens, the quiet is harder to navigate. The noises are loud music, friends hanging out and raiding your fridge, slammed doors, and huffy sighs.  Does an eye roll have a sound?  Yes. It speaks volumes.  That Spidey sense when it’s too quiet still works, but the signals can be hampered by hormones.  They are the ones who now both fear and crave quiet.  Mom, why do you have to ask so many questions?   Seriously? I am transported back to their loud public toddler queries:  why is that lady so fat?  why do we have to poop?  do babies come out of your bottom, mom?   In comparison, my questions seem civilized and tame.  They want you to be interested but not too interested, near but not too near, available but not intrusive.  The quiet you worry about now is the silent scrolling through the phone or clicking sites on the computer.   What are they up to?  You’re still holding a finger under their noses, checking for signs of life:  are they depressed?  lonely?  sad?  worried?

Sitting on the porch this morning with my coffee, it was blissfully quiet. The good kind, not the hair-prickling uneasy kind.  It’s nice to have an occasional coherent thought and time to just be.  I get times like these more often now that the kids are mostly grown, but now I look forward to the noise.  There’s peace to be had in noise, too.  Noise means life and love live here.  Noise is wrestling, jumping in the pool, and slamming car doors when your kids come home for the weekend.   “Guys!” I yell, when the couch almost tips over.  “Quiet!”   A little voice inside pipes up with a smile:  But not too quiet.

Mother’s Day Off

Mother’s Day Off

At 24, I wrote my mother’s obituary.  It wasn’t my first publication but it was certainly the most memorable.   For a long time, her absence was the thing you needed to know first about me, if you were interested in knowing me at all.  It drew jagged unreasonable outlines around my life, boundaries I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) cross, defining whom I could trust, what I might accomplish, and instilling in me a what-if mantra that drove me to compulsively record memories for my own children.

Mothers are the ground of all being, our primary source of food, comfort, and love.  They’re somehow just there, on call to Nurture and Nudge:  a given, like oxygen.  It’s said that fish discover water last, which may be one reason moms labor unappreciated for so long, like underpaid set designers and lighting directors, working backstage to make our performances masterful.   It’s only after we watch the movie premiere and get the Oscar that the brilliance and handiwork that made it all possible becomes clear.    At 24, it was just starting to dawn on me that my mom had a history and was an interesting, funny person.  I had questions and and still expected–needed–her guidance.

By then I had a master’s degree, a job, and a young marriage under my belt.   I have friends who didn’t even get past grade school with their mothers still around, so I should’ve felt lucky.  Lucky never occurred to me.  Mostly I was Sad, which on most days walked around hand-in-hand with its cousin, Angry.  Every time I went to pick up the phone to call her, a familiar sting rose in the back of my throat, quickly followed by a rush of irritation.  Friends of mine talked casually about going shopping or grabbing a quick lunch with their moms and a cloud of resentment hovered overhead.  Worse, people complained about their mothers being nosy, critical, or pushy, and it took all my strength to bite my tongue.

She died in October, so Christmas that year was a challenge, but I was wholly unprepared for what came six months later–Mother’s Day, the scourge of holidays for those with a membership in my particular club.  Every drugstore, commercial, and print ad seemed to twist the dagger.  My poor mother-in-law, who through no fault of her own could not replace the mother I’d lost, I’m sure felt my lack of enthusiasm.  I had to sit through the Sunday sermon praising the virtues of mothers, which I endured only by repeatedly singing The Star Spangled Banner in my head.

Several years later, my own children came along and sweetened the day a bit, but there will always be a mom-shaped hole in the day.  Mother’s Day can be excruciating for those who have struggled with infertility and long to hold the title of “mother” themselves.  It’s perhaps worst of all for those who have lost a child and face those who tiptoe around the holiday unsure of what to say.  Tip:  honor their motherhood, however brief.   Doing so honors the memory of their child as well.

When you’re not a raving fan of Mother’s Day, you can weather it with a tight smile and some quiet tears when it’s all over, kind of like the present political campaign.  Or, you can focus on the other meaning of mother as a verb:   to tend with care and affection.  In my mother’s absence, sisters and close friends have stepped in to tend in just this way.   Having offspring is not a  prerequisite.  It’s a reflection of the deepest impulse of human kindness and does not require small handprints in clay or dandelion bouquets.

It’s the time when a friend gave my son a ride home when I was impossibly late, and the time when I surprised my daughter’s friend with her favorite dessert for her birthday.  It’s my friend who never fails, even after 20 years, to squeeze my shoulder, even through the phone, on days she knows will be tough.   It’s my mother-in-law’s gift of an antique pitcher, the kind my mother used to collect.  It’s bringing dinner to someone after surgery, helping decorate someone’s Christmas tree after a car accident, sending a text to a teen on their mom’s birthday, because she’s no longer here to celebrate–and you get it.  Small kindnesses, stepping in, stepping up:  all the things that mothers do in any given day.

Happy Mother’s Day to the Queens of quietly helping others when they need it.   Happy Mother’s Day to all of you who are so great at mothering.