A Quiet House is an Empty House

I am in that stage of parenting that they never warned me about. Okay, so maybe they did warn me, I just didn’t listen. That stage they so laughingly refer to as the terrible two’s only my child is three and not so terrible. But still. It’s that stage where you engage in countless conversations from the second you wake up until the second you close your eyes at night and if you want to be truthful, even continues while you sleep. What kind of conversations you of the childless persuasion ask? Every kind of conversation from do you want apple juice or grape juice, the pink cup or the orange cup, the plate with the bear or the plate with the train, be still so I can zip your pants, don’t whine, don’t you dare hit mommy, that sign says stop, Mommy is a girl and Daddy is a boy, Nana can’t come pick you up today, no tomorrow we go to the zoo, and I’ve told you that we don’t pick our nose in public. When you’re a parent, there is nothing off limits and it’s guaranteed that your child will outlast you every time unless you sedate him and even then there’s no guarantee.

I remember when our house was a place of solace, with lit candles and Enya crooning softly from a radio not covered with Sponge Bob stickers. Not anymore. Now the house actually shakes with the endless marching in his favorite cowboy boots. He’s jumping on beds and throwing things into the sink while he “helps” me clean the kitchen. He shrieks of joy every time Daddy or the UPS man comes – we won’t reveal who gets the louder shrieks. He’s singing Jesus Loves Me in the bathtub and the cartoons are blaring as we bribe him to go potty. Our house is never quiet even when my child is not in it for he undoubtedly leaves random toys that he has instructed to go off at a moment’s notice from behind a couch or a chair when I’m alone in the shower. The noise of my child carries into the car, the grocery store, the auto shop, the doctor’s office. I can’t remember the last time I experienced complete and total silence. Until today.

Today while my child was at preschool I decided not to run errands. I decided not to have my hair cut or my nails done. Instead I went to my mother’s house which was the closest place I could find to the school to avoid wasting one second of beloved “me” time driving. I chose to go to my mother’s empty house and write. Or at least that’s what I told people. I was really going to just sit and be. To drink in the delicious taste of silence. And that’s what I did.

At first it was nice. Really nice. And I drank enough of it to last me at least until he’s four. It was quiet. Really quiet. I tried to hear something and couldn’t. No whir of a distant lawn mower. No air conditioner sputtering. No ice dropping in the freezer. Just a faint ticking clock which I say doesn’t count and was probably just something loose rattling inside my head.

After a while though it became too quiet. After a while, I really started to feel what a house sounds like when the children are gone and the toys are shipped off. When the fingerprints are no longer on the door handle and the nose prints have been wiped off the glass. No tiny shoes and socks strewn in the hall. No mysterious items found in toilets and drains. Everything in its place. No more conversations. No sign that children were ever here. And you know what? It made me sad. Because it gave me a taste of what life will be like one day when my son has moved away. It reminded me that every day with my shrieking three-year-old is a blessing and that one day I will look up and have my quiet house and will probably give anything for one of these days back again.

Frazzled Mom Hiding Out in Bathroom

by Kelly Swanson

I have to talk quietly so he won’t hear me. If he hears me, he will find me, and I haven’t had a moment to myself all day. That’s why I’m sitting here in the bathroom sucking on a lollipop wishing it were a Marlboro, and clutching a bottle of cooking sherry. I just need a moment to vent. And I don’t have anybody. So you’re it.

No, it’s not about the gas bill again. I’m over that. Yes, I’m still counting points. Why do you think I’m in such a bad mood all the time? And, thank you, I’m no longer worried that my left elbow is bigger than my right. I’m just deformed. I’ll live with it. No, today I’m just tired.

That’s all there is to it. Tired. I don’t care anymore about winning the lottery, I don’t care about getting a new minivan. I don’t care about being swept away to a tropical paradise where I instantly turn into a size 0 and my breasts get perky again. I don’t care about anything but sleep.

You’re probably not going to feel sorry for me because my situation is not unique. I’m a mom. And to just one kid – a two-year-old boy– but just one kid all the same. “Oh shut up,” my Aunt Edna always says, “I had four kids in two years. You don’t even know tired.”

Please….just this one time…don’t tell me you have it worse…..don’t be like my cousin Shirley who constantly whines about how bad she’s got it. Waa, waa, waa. I’ve got three kids. We live in a trailer with my great Aunt Nadine who keeps losing her teeth while my no-good husband is in Nashville trying to make it as a country/western singer in between shifts at the nude car wash.

Maybe she does have it worse, but just for today. Take one minute out of your day to listen to a stranger. I won’t tell you the story of my life. I won’t even tell you the story of my week. Just let me tell you about my day. That’s all I ask.

He gets up at 5am. Which means I get up at five am and throw him another day-old cereal bar so he can watch cartoons while I get ready. Oh I know I know about that whole cartoon will rot his brain stuff. I was worried about it for about two weeks and then I got over that. I’ll trade rotted brain for some moments of quiet.

So I get one eyebrow done and I hear something that I know means trouble - silence. If you’re a mom and you hear silence, run.

In our house, junior’s silence usually means he’s either got the cat caught up in another death grip that he innocently refers to as playing – or he’s naked. In this case it’s the latter.

I follow the trail of pajamas and socks and diaper pieces (he can’t just take the thing off, he’s got to shred it in the process) and I get to where my beloved son is standing on top of his train play table playing my pee pee’s a water gun and firing on a helpless line of stuffed animals as well as anything else he deems worthy of death by pee pee – which now includes my bathrobe which is the price you pay when you startle an unsuspecting pee shooter. They’ll turn on you. That was just the beginning.

He refuses to get in his car seat because he thinks the dead leaf on the window is a bug, and he’s suddenly developed a terrifying phobia for anything smaller than a fly and lets out a terrifying shriek that can be heard all over the world – a shriek which he now finds to be quite fun and so continues shrieking without ceasing for a good twenty minutes – seeing how high up he can get in octave without breaking glass.

He sings Jesus Loves Me This I Know to the sweet foreign gentleman working at the gas station who apparently was not in a singing mood which did nothing to deter junior from singing it louder and louder with more urgency as if threatening to pull out his weapon and pee the poor man to death. I got a dirty look from this old lady beside me and I said, “What? We’re witnessing. Would you be interested in a pamphlet?” That shut her up.

I spend forever in the gym parking lot trying to find the ten-cent red rubber nose he found earlier in the week on the floor of the auto shop that had now rolled under the car. And he’s crying in jags stopping only to hold his breath and I’m under the car screaming, “I’ll give you something to cry about young man” and secretly hoping he doesn’t start holding his breath again – cause the gym nursery won’t take ‘em if they’re blue.

Oh, and get this. He chokes on a piece of gum at the grocery store – right in front of the feminine products, which is just Murphy’s Law. And I pounded him on the back a couple of times like we do to Uncle Willy when he eats steak without his teeth, and the gum finally shoots out. And it was really a crisis, ‘cause that was like my last piece.

And this little old lady gives me this sour look like it was my fault that Junior threw his sandal into her grocery cart and pulled over a display of oranges before I could catch him. And she’s all sour-faced and looking at me like I was something she scraped off the bottom of her shoe, and I’m like, “Look old woman, cut me some slack, he’s not even my kid. Check the milk carton in the back.”

He’s figured out how to roll down the window (used recycled Pintos don’t come with child window locks) and in the course of a four-minute conversation I had on my cell phone (telling my sister why I will never shop at the Wally Mart again) he manages to get his window down, work his way out of his clothes and throw them out, along with his diapers and his socks and his shoes, at intervals along highway 68. All of this in four minutes, while still strapped in and without making a peep. This from a kid who can’t keep the food on his fork from the plate to his mouth.

I could go on, but I’m not. Because I just don’t have the energy is why. And that’s why I’m here. Hiding in the bathroom. While he’s out there. Somewhere. Plotting. Scheming. Lurking. Help me! It’s only 10am. I’m tired.