Sunday, 9:52 a.m.
I am going to describe a phenomenon that I think only parents can truly appreciate. As much as I hate to play the old "you wouldn't get it, you're not a parent" card (the ultimate hipster douche comment,) in this case I am talking about a particular feeling that, while anyone can understand, only those who have felt this feeling in context can really empathize with what I'm describing.
When you have young children, usually just past toddler age, quiet moments are hard to come by. In particular, if you have two or more such kids, they will spend approximately 99.7% of their waking moments cranked up to eleven. They have an innate ability to find the specific resonant frequency of your skull, and can create sympathetic vibrations capable of rendering you inchoate with convulsive rage spasms.
They scream and yell a lot, is what I am saying.
But every once in a while, the stars slide into perfect alignment. Virgo rises in the seventh house and Venus is ascendent, the Great Sky Spirit lays his mantle of peace upon the land, the Fates pause at their weaving, and all the dice show twenties. And in this most auspicious moment of golden joy, there is quiet. Blessed, divine silence.
Suddenly, the constant, reverberating clangor that is the cosmic background radiation of a parent's universe is stilled. The throbbing in your brain slows to a standstill, and you release the breath that you did not realize you had been holding for the past month or so and, just for a moment, you relax.
Suddenly you can hear the distant singing of birds. You unclench previously uncatalogued muscles around your neck region. Life slows down for a moment and you remember your life before the coming of the offspring.
For me, it was today, when Arthur (3) was in his room playing quietly. Grace (5) was reading (!) in her room, oblivious to the world around her. Mommy was working out front, and I was simply working in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher like I was raking the pebble garden in a Zen monastery. The sunlight was at the kitchen window, and it was just me, the clatter of dishes lining up in neat order, and the soft drone of a lazy bumblebee outside my window.
Here's the 'parents only' part. Because while all of us have enjoyed a moment of silence now and again, those with small children will truly know this feeling. How can I describe it to those of you who may not have kids of your own? What words could possibly capture the essence of this sensation?
I think the closest I can come to it is stark terror.
Or maybe dread is more accurate. Yes, definitely dread. A cold, creeping dread that steals in through the cracks and joints of your spirit and slowly chills you to the marrow like the doomed protagonist of a Jack London story. This sort of dread rolls in like a sickly fog, billowing higher and higher until all around you is obscured in the thick pall of icy, existential fear that consumes all the light and hope in the world.
But it never comes alone.
Because with it seeps the denser, more syrupy texture of guilt. Because silence in children is unnatural, and demands investigation. And yet every fibre of your body screams out to let it go unexplored, clutching with all the fierceness of sleep, fighting against the intrusions of a 5 a.m. alarm clock.
You know you have to stop what you are doing and check on the children, because of that very unnatural calm that allowed you to relax in the first place. But, come on! Can't you just have five more minutes?
No.
Because you've seen too many horrifying after school specials and grisly public service announcements to ever rest again. Every city bus that rolls past in traffic displays one more imminent threat of death to your child, and every stoic, judging billboard carries a stern reminder of your inadequacy as a parent and the looming disaster that awaits the unwary.
For you non-parents, I want you to think of a horror movie. Pretty much any one will do, they nearly all feature the same requisite scene. There comes a point where one of the hapless characters fears that there is something, something lurking in the closet/attic/laboratory/abandoned hunting cabin in Murder Woods.
So of course they decide to go check it out. You scream at these benighted simpletons, warning them not to throw their fictional lives away on a fool's errand. Why can't they understand their deadly folly, and simply torch the entire structure and run screaming away forever? You know what they should do of course, because you know what terrible fate awaits them within, and devoutly wish you could warn them of the ghost/zombie horde/sports equipment-clad serial killer awaiting them, but alas, they stumble forward to meet their grisly fate, flashlights raised. But of course they must check it out, because they do not know of the horrors that await them.
This, my childless friends, is what silence is like for parents. We must go check it out. No matter how many times we peer in the door to find them calmly engaged in play, looking up in innocent curiosity, making mockery of our worry, we still must investigate.
Afterwards, we try to return to that restful quiet, but alas, it is gone. Like touching a delicate soap bubble, childsilence bursts as soon as it is prodded, any investigation shattering the moment as surely as observing a quantum event will alter its outcome.
And so, the bone-jarring din resumes, the juicebox-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of experience is drowned (out by the high pitched caterwaul of infantile voices.) And the great wheel of parenthood rolls forward, grinding your sanity to meal, one squeal of laughter or indignant screech at a time.
I love my kids.
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