Give Me Some Earplugs!

By Melodee

I’m turning into my grandmother with her intolerance for noise. Macular degeneration stole her sight, so she sits in one chair, mostly, listening to the silence when she isn’t listening to the Bible on tape. I rarely take my kids to viist because I know she cannot tolerate the noise. She’s 101. What’s my excuse?

I am a quiet type of person, one who wouldn’t turn on the radio or television if I were alone all day (which I never am). I have no need for conversation or for expending a certain allotment of words per day. I had to develop an ability to make small-talk because chatting doesn’t come naturally to me.

And yet, I’m living with a bunch of people who won’t stop talking to me. My daughter is the worst of the bunch. If I sit down, she appears like a pesky genie, begging me to get a snack from the “covered” (aka the “cupboard”) and asking me if I “bemember” when she was three and cut her hand on a barnacle. She’s uninterested in snuggling or playing with Play-doh or lying down to rest, even when she tells me how tired she is. No, she just wants to talk, talk, talk.

If I happen to be alone, thinking actual thoughts while washing the dishes, my sons will traipse through the kitchen on their never-ending quest to drink all the milk without my knowledge and they will ask me crazy questions, questions that spring from the murky space in their brains where they are piecing together the mysteries of life and plotting to get their hands on some Chinese egg rolls soon. Just because I’m immobile, scrubbing dried milk from glasses, does not mean that I’m not occupied in my head, pondering something. To them, I look like a fount of knowledge, a convenient source to dip the buckets of their curiosity.

I can’t have two coherent thoughts in a row which frustrates me and makes me feel a little crazy as if I’m being tortured by the systematic drip-drip-drip of words.

I want to spend my days stringing words together like so many fancy beads, but I can’t. I can’t because I’m living in a madhouse with chatty kids. And I’m complaining about it which definitely disqualifies me for the Mother of the Year.

My daughter will turn five on September 2. She misses the local kindergarten cut-off date by a day. I never thought I’d do this, but I am likely to send her to preschool because she has turned into Miss Extrovert who asks every visitor who appears at our door, “Can I come to your house?” She wants to go, do, talk, visit, play, and then go some more. She’s wearing me out which makes me feel guilty and old. Also, uninteresting and uncreative.

Silence is all I want which is ironic because I spent so much of my twenties crying because then all I wanted was a baby. I just can’t be pleased. Now I just want to be alone.

Originally posted April 26, 2007 at Actual Unretouched Photo