“Making the decision to have a child – it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” – Elizabeth Stone.
Many a mother has read this quote on a mug or plaque and gasped in recognition. That’s because it’s true! However, it doesn’t really represent the most world-changing reality that comes with motherhood. Rather, the aspect of motherhood that changes a woman’s life most profoundly is that once a child starts talking in full sentences, his or her mother can kiss focus, concentration and silence goodbye. After giving birth, every mother eventually starts sleeping through the night again within the first year of her baby’s life. However, the luxury of silence is gone for the next eighteen or so years. It eventually sinks in that for the foreseeable future, she must perform all her daily tasks while carrying on incessant conversation with her children. In other words, moms are bionic, conversational heroes who make family life run smoothly while also carrying on a decades-long, stream of consciousness chat. They are gifted verbal savants often disguised as slightly plump clog-wearers in high-waisted jeans.
As a raging introvert, this reality has been particularly challenging for me. I have two daughters who are currently fourteen and eleven. When my oldest daughter first started stringing words together into sentences, my life changed forever. At that point, I had a newborn and a toddler. Not only was I often required to nurse the younger baby and support her body with one hand while bathing the toddler with the other hand, I was also required to simultaneously explain the mysteries of the universe and dole out strict hygiene instructions while doing so. Bath time went something like this: Raise tiny arm and scrub darling armpit, “Mommy….how come my belly button pokes in and yours pokes out?” Wrestling other tiny, stubborn fist from inside tiny, sudsy mouth, “Because your umbilical cord dried out and fell off a little differently than mine. So your nub is smaller than mine! Now please don’t eat the soap. You’ll wake up in the night with a tummy ache.” Tiny feet now splashing the wailing baby, “How come my tummy will hurt? Will I poop when my tummy hurts?” “Because soap is not food and when we put things that are not food in our bellies, they hurt. Also, do not splash your sister! Water stays in the tub please or you cannot have a cracker after bath time!”
And so it went. The words kept coming. Words while I fixed dinner, “Can I have goldfish? But I like goldfish and they do not make tummy too full! You are wrong Mommy! You are not a sharing friend!” Words while I cleaned the house, “The vacuum is too loud. I cannot hear Elmo. Can you turn it off mommy?” Words while I peed, “Mommy, are you in there? What are you doing? Are you pooping now Mommy? Did you eat soap?” The words have never ceased. “Why is the sky blue?” eventually metamorphosed into, “Can I borrow one of your tank tops?” but the soundtrack of my life has remained the same. I do adult-ish things while talking and talking and talking with my children.
As I write today, we are at the airport. Each adolescent child has packed a backpack containing snacks, gum, water and reading material. Nonetheless, while peacefully filling my water bottle at the airport fountain, it has been incumbent upon me to (1) break up an argument over whether daughter #1 had already reminded daughter #2 about filling up her water bottle and (2) answer the question, “Can I get more tinted moisturizer?” These are urgent questions, dear reader. They cannot wait for a person to fill up a water bottle under any circumstances.
The effect of all this talking is that I have become very adept at conversational triage. I know which questions must actually be answered with clarity and which conversations can be ended through a simple, blank nod of the head while checking Facebook. (We adults have important questions of our own after all, like, “Is everyone hanging out without me?” and “Are my frenemies already taking another vacation even though they went to Cabo last month?” Facebook answers these solemn questions, for better or worse). After many years of non-stop conversation, my girls’ voices, as precious as they are, sometimes become white noise. Their speech is like a flight attendant’s safety instructions after passengers have put on their headphones – audible but sometimes covertly ignored. This is not bad parenting! It is survival. A clog-wearer has to do a few things she is not proud of in order to keep her ears from exploding from too many words…okay people?
It is now summer. My precious urchins are with me from morning until night and they have a lot to say. Words about booty shorts and why they are not that bad. Words about caramel Frappuccinos and how everyone else’s mom buys them all the time. Words about which apps should trigger the parental controls on an iPhone and how controls are stupid. In these summer days, I confess that I sometimes become a fugitive from words. My hideouts are varied and utterly ignoble: my car, the bathroom, a tiny, hidden corner of the back deck. Sometimes I hear the natives stalking me, “Mom, where are you? Can we go to American Eagle?” I tell them the truth in my head while I crouch in place like a doomed soldier at the Alamo. “Yes we can go in five minutes. And what am I doing? I am resting my eardrums, my love. I am taking a luxury vacation right now from your flapping gums. You do not see how this is luxurious? How charming. This is what previous generations meant when they said, ‘Silence is golden.’” However, my forebears were wrong in one tiny way. I think silence is more like platinum — expensive, rare and liable to be stolen. How fortunate that I love these precious thieves so incredibly much.
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