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.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Can You Hear Me Now?

Back when my children were toddlers underfoot, there were many days when I heard a constant stream of alternating chatter, screaming, laughing, whining, crying, and singing. Back then, Barney and Dora played incessantly as the soundtrack of my life.  I fielded endless “whys” from sunup to sundown.  Why I hafta go sleep?  Why did Hiccup the hamster die?  Why is Dora’s head so big? (That one will have to remain one of the universe’s mysteries.)

Some evenings, after failed attempts at playing “Quiet as a Mouse,” I just had to blurt, “Mommy’s ears are really tired!  Can we give them a little rest for a few minutes?”  Back then, I would have paid big bucks for five minutes of quiet alone in the bathroom, and nap times were manna from heaven.  I mainlined the quiet and stillness like a heroin addict.

Now that one of the children is off to college and the other is completely independent and often doing homework or in his own world wearing headphones at a computer screen, the quiet I longed for has arrived.  And it brought along its friends, anxiety and restlessness.   The silence prods me:  is there something you should be doing?  Someone you should be looking after?  Where’s that list of To-Do’s and action items?

While I don’t mind the quiet, I’m not very good at it.   I come by it honestly.   I’m pretty sure I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen my father sit down and just relax.  I’m not sure he gets the concept, really.  He’ll go on vacation to visit one of his kids and end up patching our drywall, repairing a privacy fence, or installing a ceiling fan.  He doesn’t stay in one place for very long.  After a couple of days, he’s ready to get back on the road.  Things to do, places to go.   You know these people.  Often they are our mothers or grandmothers, who slaved over holiday feasts only to be bobbing up and down from the table like the Whack-a-Mole game, their own dinners untouched and cold.

A few years ago, I learned of a piece of music composed by John Cage in 1952.  It’s called 4’33”, and it consists of three movements entirely of rests.  The performer appears on stage, sits at the piano to begin while the audience waits in anticipation, and then nothing.  Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.  The pianist counts all the measures of rests as the audience squirms.  What is going on?  Did he forget the music?  Does he have stage fright?  People look at one another nervously.

Four minutes and thirty-three seconds is a long time to be quiet.  Just ask a toddler playing “Quiet as a Mouse.” Eventually, you start to listen, not to the music, but to the absence of it:  the creaking of the seat cushions, a cough, someone’s whisper, the rustle of a program.  You’re forced to settle in, get past the initial discomfort, and hear a different sort of music in your surroundings.  Even the sound of your own breath becomes a choir of its own, filling the empty air with notes of spontaneous melody.

There is a beauty that arises from stillness, from silence, that we often disregard because it’s not as urgent or demanding as noise.  It’s like the well-behaved child reading by herself who gets no attention because the rowdy cousins are swinging from the drapes in the other room.  The dearest of friends are those who can sit still with you in the hospital waiting room, those who don’t have to keep up a barrage of chatter lest the room grow uncomfortably quiet.  There are tense silences (when you’ve just laid the baby down and are tiptoeing soundlessly out of the nursery like a ninja) and easy, comfortable ones (when you’ve turned in for the night with your spouse and you’re both reading in bed companionably, conversation optional).

What this new-found quiet at my house has taught me is that I haven’t practiced it very much.  Silence and I haven’t spent much quality time together.   My day is usually full of conversations, phone calls, TV, traffic, the car radio, podcasts, itunes, even a running commentary in my own head, much like those from my kids that used to make my ears so tired.  Even if I’m sitting quietly, I’m occupied with a book or my phone.

I know I’m not alone in this.  Aside from the technology addiction that many of us have (admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, people!), we don’t know how to sit still in the quiet and just be.  We demand constant entertainment, distraction, busyness, and noise, which is why the 4’33” concert piece so unnerves audiences.  I have to wonder what we are so afraid of?  What do we think will fill the quiet if we let it happen?  If we turn off the car radio while we’re running errands, what rushes in?  If we sit quietly for a few minutes without scrolling through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, what thoughts arise?

Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline elaborates on the practice of silence as a spiritual discipline.  As with most things spiritual, if you empty yourself of one thing, something else takes its place.  Empty yourself of noise and silence settles upon you, often bringing its own kind of disquiet. What thoughts are there, lurking beneath the noise?  I’ve been practicing being quiet, enjoying the silence, hearing what’s already there instead of injecting my own noise into the universe.

All the noise is exhausting, and we don’t even realize it until it’s absent and we breathe deeper and our shoulders relax.  Without the car radio on, once I run through my own stream of consciousness thoughts, the quiet often leads me to prayer.  “Well, I pray,” you say.  “I’m so disciplined I even have a quiet time every morning, just me in the quiet before the day starts.”   Awesome.  You’re way ahead of me.   But prayer is a conversation, not just you phoning in your thoughts or requests.  Often we just yak away and forget that there’s a second act.  Being still and knowing.  Listening in the quiet.  If you don’t think that there might be an answer, then why waste your time in prayer?   No telling what might bubble up from the quiet and surprise you.  The still, small voice is awfully hard to hear when you drown it out.

In the movie Get Smart, one of the coolest gadgets was the Cone of Silence.  Once under it, cone of silenceall noise completely stopped, like inside a vacuum.   Being a silence rookie, I wish I had one of these convenient devices that I could activate whenever I need a “moment of silence.”  (There I go, dependent on technology again.)

I still appreciate some noise in my days.  I like a good car jam as well as anyone (celebration is also a spiritual discipline, by the way)!  But I’m learning through my circumstances and newly quiet house to appreciate the silence and the lessons it teaches.