The Quiet Can Be Deceiving When You’re Parenting at the End of the World
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Most weekdays now I drop my kids off at school around 7:30 in the morning while the light is soft and the Florida winter air feels expectant.
I make a brief stop in the car line, the three children tumble out, my oldest tells me goodbye, and the younger two race off ahead because they are in a perpetual contest to see who can get somewhere, anywhere, the fastest.
I drive along the bustling morning streets filled with people rushing somewhere, anywhere. My destination is the coffee shop across town where I pick up my mobile order of an iced coffee, sometimes nodding to the gray-haired man who stands beside his car every morning smoking an e-cigarette before going inside to place his order.
I drive next to the grocery store around the corner from my house and pick up cereal, lunchables, fruit, a vegetable or two, juice, ice cream, and a variety of less-than-stellar foods on which we typically survive. I go through the self-checkout line. It’s pretty easy to avoid human interaction these days.
I unload the groceries at home, try to get my elderly chihuahua to eat and take the medications that keep him alive, and settle in for another day of deceptive silence.
The house is quiet for these few hours each day, yes, but it almost always feels loud.
As I open up my laptop for another day of work the volume of my thoughts begins to ramp up like when a YouTube video is interrupted by an ad, and it inevitably blares ten times louder. There’s paid work I need to attend to—an ad to write, a paper to edit. There’s unpaid work that will not be denied—laundry to fold, toilets to scrub, bunny cages to hose out. And, of course, I have to set aside time for constant worry.
Am I being too careless by sending the kids to school when I know our school district has zero protections in place for their health and safety? Or am I being neurotic and passing on my fears to my kids, thus damaging their mental health? Or, hey, why not both?
The clock ticks down, four hours, three, two. Really, there’s never that much time until the circus returns to town. The rumble of anticipation grows louder.
My oldest has been struggling physically for months now with a variety of somewhat mysterious maladies. I spend a great deal of the after-school time sitting beside him on the couch, bringing him comfort after he’s expended all his energy getting through the school day. Honestly, being still is not my strength. Fetching snacks, loading the dishwasher, getting everyone ready for tennis lessons and soccer practices, overseeing bath times, maintaining a schedule and order—all of that comes naturally. But sitting beside my child when all he needs is for his body to rest against mine? It can be much more daunting than climbing a mountain of laundry.
The quiet doesn’t find me, I have to fight for it.
We sit and I read him a book while he eats white bean chili soup with tortilla chips. One of the only foods he seems to enjoy these days. We’re reading a series called Fablehaven and he eagerly slips into the world of fairies and monsters. Meanwhile, my younger two play and/or fight together—outside, on scooters and bikes, inside, upstairs, and down. They flit around somewhere, anywhere at the periphery of my attention. I know they aren’t getting enough of me right now, but I fight to keep that thought from growing too loud.
As we try our best to muddle along in the year 2022 amidst a fourth? eighth? twenty-seventh? pandemic wave, any perceived quiet is deceiving because it feels like a momentous, life-changing, crashing boom could thunder upon us at any moment. I guess that’s life as a human all the time, but it’s more viscerally real and present right now. Like Midsummer’s Eve—the one night of the year the magical creatures have free reign to move about wherever they like on the Fablehaven preserve.
I expected a little more quiet in my life this year after nearly a decade of twenty-four-seven parenting. The universe had a different idea. But perhaps quiet isn’t truly attainable under any circumstances. Definitely not now. I mean, who needs kids around to bring the noise when your brain does a pretty good job all on its own?
Andrew is a writer of essays and humor and an editor of Frazzled, a parenting humor publication on Medium. You can subscribe to his email list for updates and follow him on Twitter for terrible tweets and more Fablehaven content, probably.