Skip to main content

What is Your Favorite Quiet Moment?

For an essay I'm submitting that asks, "What's your favorite quiet moment?"

Being in a house with two kids under four years old, it is hard to imagine a moment of quiet. We've been operating on a 24 hour schedule since the baby's birth 11 weeks ago, and one can find us doing something at any time of the day or night.

I wouldn't say we are quiet people by nature. Both my husband, Andy, and I enjoy talking to one another, talking on the phone, listening to music and watching TV, sometimes all at the same time. We have a very noisy family and I find it incredibly comforting. My almost-four-year-old daughter has become increasingly chatty and finds repetition amusing. We start the morning and end the day with a series of repeated questions. "Mommy, what's your name? Mommy, what's Daddy's name. Can I have some juice? What are we doing today? Mommy, what's your name? Mommy, what's Daddy's name? Can I have some juice? What are we doing today?" While she catches her breath between questions, we hear the sweet coo or cry of the baby, trying to be heard amidst the rest of us.

Andy and I have learned to have mini conversations between our children's cries and calls for attention. We weave our discussions about our days and family business between bath tub splashing, feedings, diaper changes, pushes on the swing and potty trips. We exercise our memories by picking up on conversations hours after they were first started.

While I'm doing all of these activities I'm always thinking. I'm processing my new role as a mom to multiple children, worrying about my return to work and making mental to-do check lists. Even my dreams are busy. I always seem to be running after something, forgetting something and feeling so tired when I wake up to start the next day.

We have a time in our house, after lunch, called "quiet time." It's quite funny that I even try to quiet our household. I should rename it "Go in Your Room and Cry to Me While I Throw In a Load of Laundry Time". You get the picture. Here's my point: every day, even if only for a passing moment, I find complete and utter quiet in my mind and in my heart. Usually it happens when I'm carrying one of the kids and I feel her chest rising in rhythm to my own and her soft skin brushes my cheek. Other times it is more unexpected like when I'm at the dinner table and nobody needs a fork, napkin, drink or second helpings and I'm able to sit down. Or when I pull the car into the driveway, after the shopping trip from hell, and both kids are happily sleeping in the backseat, giving me time to unload the bags and just maybe pull a lawn chair up next to the car to sit in the sun, close my eyes, and listen to their breathing. In these moments, the chaos from the world comes to a silent, precious stand still.

There's always noise in my life, either from the outside, or that I make. I find my quiet moment inside myself when I stop thinking and worrying and I just smile at my not-so-quiet life.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Charlotte's Story

What can you do in seventeen minutes? Watch an episode of your favorite sitcom without commercials? Run two miles at a good clip? Eat a meal, or in Andy's case, microwave a meal and then eat it? Have a baby? Because that's what I did. You heard me right. I birthed a baby in seventeen minutes because I am a machine. I am a machine ! I am a baby birthing woman of steel. I am not much of a bragger and you may recall that I was never good and never bad at anything. I have no particular achievements to tout, academically, physically, professionally or otherwise except baby birthing. I'm really good at this and I'm pretty darn proud of it and I'd like to brag about it to you now. This is Charlotte's birth story. For the first four or five months of my pregnancy with Charlotte, most people forgot that I was even pregnant. This does happen to you with multiple pregnancies. I never forgot that I was pregnant. Morning sickness heart burn and frequent bathroom t

Spoiler Alert!

It's no big shock that I opened my mouth and got myself in trouble earlier this week. This time it was my virtual mouth, and we all know that can be the worst. Saying something stupid, online, is like spreading a highly contagious virus. Speaking of which, with all of my recent coughing and sneezing, I've been really good at spreading a germy virus around. I teach students to be social media savvy, and gosh darn it, I did so as recent as yesterday. I provide them with some rules to protect them from looking like a virtual ass, but low and behold, I fall victim to assiness every once in a while. How am I supposed to know every single rule in life, and particularly online? I'm just a simple human being, with a big mouth, who wants to over share! So, here's what went down, if you didn't get pissy pants over my FB faux pas. I watched the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead on Sunday night. Andy was in the can and I just needed to talk about the episode. I needed t

The guilt epidemic

Women are wonderful at time management and I've been told I'm tenacious about time-on-task and follow-through. Parenthood has really put a damper on my ability to follow a rigid schedule that enables me to do everything. When morning sickness showed up at week 5, I hung up my a.m. workout sneakers. Those shoes continue to collect dust although I'm proud to say they are dusted off once a week for 30 minutes. Just getting to the gym for that short amount of time has been a major accomplishment in a world full of parent-guilt. Guilt. A feeling traditionally reserved for Catholics has been spreading into the female parent population for the past fifty years and has become increasingly prevalent over the last decade. Lucky me to be raised Catholic, born a woman and now gifted with parenthood. I had a .01% chance of escaping the guilt-disease. I have "attacks" or "flare ups" when I decide to do something for myself. In addition to going to the gym once week, f