There Will Be Time for Quiet Later
One Sunday every month, I tuck my laptop under my arm and trudge up the stairs to the bedroom to write. I’d rather be perched at the desk hidden away in our pantry, but my children always find me on their search for a bag of chips or crayons or toilet paper. Our pantry houses many things, my creativity amongst them.
One Sunday a month, though, I escape my normal space in search of solace and (please God) some profound thought upon which to build 900 words by my column deadline for the local paper.
Tonight, I am miles from profundity. With Bruno Mars blaring from my kitchen and three of four boys play-acting an episode of PJ Masks, the likelihood of crafting anything worthwhile is slim. Like an angel of mercy, my husband turns the music off; Bruno comes to a screeching halt, though my children continue to holler from the living room.
“Mama’s trying to finish writing,” I hear him say. I’m actually trying to begin, but I appreciate his confidence. The doorknob turns and my oldest checks to see if he can shower in my bathroom.
“I’m busy right now, babe,” I say. “But before you go, I need a hug. Five seconds.” He offers me his back. “Ummm…no. Back hugs suck.” He smiles and turns around, wrapping his arms around my neck. He’s big enough for me to lean into now, and I snuggle my head into his hoodie. I don’t let go.
“Okay. That’s like ten,” he says but doesn’t pull away. How many more seconds can I squeeze out of him? How many more years will he let me squeeze him at all?
Three seconds more and he’s wriggled free. “Mom, why are you up here?”
“I can’t get anything done downstairs when you’re all home. It’s so loud.”
He shrugs and closes the door on his way out. I hear him thump down the stairs to rejoin the fray, each step falling harder than the last.
I always wanted a thundering house, spilling over with grubby kids and laughter. I also always wanted a career. For so many years, I believed I could have both simultaneously just as countless women have done, balancing stacks of spinning plates so well. I never considered that our first child would affect my job. Of course, I would keep working. The baby would just be some tiny extra person taking up space in the corner. My independence and identity would remain unchanged.
Then baby number two arrived, and again, there was little planning or rearranging of our lives. This is what women did. They had babies and they worked and it was all just fine. Right?
Wrong. Baby number two came with complications, and those complications made continuing to work difficult. For me, a perfectionist with a penchant for control, it was all but impossible – so I became a fortunate (yet reluctant) stay-at-home mom. I have fought this title for six years, but following the last twelve months, the mandated stripping away of life’s countless distractions, I have come to accept that, at least for now, I am simply and astonishingly a mother. This giant blessing of my life has finally won me over.
I recall a conversation I had just days before the pandemic hit. It was a chat I’d had a hundred times before, but this time, I actually listened.
“The house is just so quiet now,” I remember the woman saying. Her husband had passed the previous year and her children had long since moved away. There was a look in her eye that infiltrated my thoughts for days, the glare of a tear or a memory of the noise now gone. When the world shut down, I could not get her or her quiet house out of my mind. That vision stays with me still, especially in times when my raucous children howl around me like wolves.
In these moments, any semblance of my former selfhood dead and gone, I picture this woman waking in the morning, shuffling toward the kitchen to brew coffee, crack eggs and butter toast for no one but herself. I picture her rocking gently with a book in hand or pulling weeds in the afternoon sun. I see her fixing supper for one, spending the final hours of her day in front of the television or her Bible. I hear her footsteps whisper down the hallway to bed at night, no children to check on or water glasses to fill. I watch her sleep until morning, never woken by the snores of a husband or toddler’s stray foot lodged in her kidney. Sometimes I see her face. Sometimes I see my own.
“They’ll be gone before you know it,” warn the women who’ve come before. As moms of babies, we nod and smile. We are so far from comprehending what this means, how the growing absence of our children will actually feel within the aching center of us. These children who now consume every second of our lives will someday be consumed with lives of their own.
“The house is just so quiet now,” she reminds me. The chaos, the noise is fleeting. I call up my oldest child and settle on the bathroom rug as he takes a shower. He tells me all his little boy thoughts over the buzz of a bathroom fan. I finish my column after he’s gone to sleep. There will be time for quiet later.
Ashley, Woman of a Certain Grace