All this time I had longed for just a moment of peace and quiet, but now that it was here, the quiet did not resemble peace at all. It felt like a prison. A prison where every gulp of coffee, every twist of the Chapstick cap, every fingertip through my hair echoed through my empty home— reminding me that the ones who fill this space, and my heart, weren’t there.
When you’re a mom, silence usually signals trouble. “What are you up to? It’s too quiet in there!” is a staple phrase in motherhood, because our instincts tell us that silence equates to danger.
The silence felt so dangerous. In the silence, I could hear everything. Each footstep across the tile sounded like a sticker being peeled from its backing. The noise was so deafening, that I crept up onto my tippy toes to make it stop—but all that did was add ankle cracking to the volume of each step. I felt paralyzed in the hush that had swept over my home. Crippled by the creaks and groans of a 50 year old home that had always been drowned out by giggles, or Mickey, or crying. It was in the stillness that I found my heart racing. It was in the calm that I knew I could never live without the chaos.
My chaos.
The chaos that fills my home with tantrums over putting on shorts or serving waffles instead of yogurt. The chaos that turned a nice leather couch into a loaf of flakey, pull apart bread. The chaos that inhales unnaturally putrid diapers and exhales screams of excitement and laughter. The chaos that would never allow me to finish a cup of hot coffee or listen to the sounds of my food being chewed. The chaos that I can hear from the street when I take out the bins on trash day. The chaos that billows out through the chimney like a batch of warm, burnt, chocolate chip cookies.
This. This is my peace and quiet.
It isn’t the kind of silence where you can hear your own breath or the jingle of your jacket zipper. It’s the quiet of a snoring baby less than three feet away. The peace of a toddler nestled in close for a story he’s read a million times before. The quiet of a good snack on that flakey, pull-apart-bread couch that you swear you’ll replace one day. It’s the ABC’s and 123’s and Itsy Bitsy—because somehow their faces get even brighter each and every time you wash that spider out. It’s the lather, rinse, repeat cycle of every single day that wears you down and builds you up, all at the same time. It’s the peace in knowing that you need these tiny humans just as much, if not more, than they need you.
All this time I had longed for just a moment of peace and quiet— turns out it was in front of me the entire time.
Author Bio: Andi is a stay-at-home mom to two off the wall boys, who don’t believe in naps. She loves to cook, awkwardly exercise in her living room, and drink wine by the bottle. You can find her at Lend Me Your Kite where she chronicles the happy, hilarious, and hard moments of mommy-hood.