Do you know how hard it is to not look at a 47” HDTV when it is directly in front of you 15 feet
away? It’s darn near impossible.
That is my plight these days.
We bought our house because of the open family
room/kitchen/breakfast room but this room.
How great will it be
that we can watch TV while we are in the kitchen making meals? we gushed
about our new “family-friendly”space. We did not consider the impact that our
freight-train-wannabe dishwasher would have on our ability to hear the
television sometimes. And we certainly didn’t anticipate I would decide to give
up television one day turning our family “room” into a family “battlefield”.
During the last 9 days, our (not so) Great Room has become my least favorite
thing about our house. The kitchen counter…the one where I do 90% of the food
prep and cooking…faces our 47” television.
Why in the name of heaven do 47” televisions even exist?
I know…football. Whatever.
But we are going to have to come to some sort of
understanding if all four of us are to survive the next 21 days. If they want
me to cook their dinner, they will need to find some other form of entertainment
besides the giant light box/sound maker that envelops the space where I work to
feed them. Once I can move to another room, they can have at it -- as long as
their homework is finished and they’re not watching Rated R movies.
They grunt and ask, “Like what?” I suggested cleaning their
rooms, the toilets, reading a book, taking the dog for a walk. They looked at
me like I’m crazy.
“Just don’t look up from the kitchen counter…you might cut
your finger anyway.”
That’s the advice I was offered from one of my teenagers…you
know…the ones whose praises I sang for you the other day?
Miscreants. Both of them.
Not really…but it does seem like a small concession to
ensure that you have a healthy meal and that
your dear mother doesn’t get a crick in her neck from craning it downward to
avoid the TV. We’re going to have to work something out.
It’s also really quiet
in my house. Because I had been using TV as background noise for my day, I was
really careful last week not to just replace it with other noise…like Pandora
or Spotify or iTunes. So essentially, my first two days looked like this:
Wake up
Morning kids are pretty quiet (except on occasion when one
might wake up chattier than normal) and I’m usually out for my run before they
wake up. The longer our runs have been, the less likely I am to make it home
before they leave. And daughter is at swim practice at 5:00am three days a week
anyhow. So I have quiet early in the
morning.
Leonard leaves for work around 8:30 and he mostly snoozes on
the couch before getting ready for work. More quiet.
Then – for 2 days last week – it was pretty much silent from
8:30 am until 3:00 pm when everyone got home. And then it was like a SOUND
TSUNAMI for which I was absolutely unprepared. Both kids wanted snacks,
conversation, permission slips signed, a run-down of my day, a dinner menu, and
something found (whatever they’ve lost) and they wanted it immediately and, for
some reason, they want it loudly. Or maybe everything seemed louder after 6 ½
hours of silence.
Then, almost as quickly as it overcame me, the Tsunami of
sound receded about 20 minutes later when they left for swim practice. Then I
had 3 more hours of silence.
These are the things I’ve noticed about silence:
First of all, it’s not really silent.
Electricity buzzes – or rather, things that use electricity
buzz. The laptop has a low hum to it. Fedex planes are landing at the
airport…about every 3 minutes one flies over. Occasionally a car goes by and I
can hear that it needs someone to investigate its muffler. The water in one of
our toilets is running. There is a siren several blocks away. A dog barks
nearby. The refrigerator makes a squeaking noise every so often. My stomach
gurgles. The cat’s collar jingles as she darts across the upstairs hall for no
reason. My joints crack when I change positions in the chair. The click of my
laptop’s touchpad…or the mouse…and the keyboard.
Second of all, every sound (phone ringing, text dinging, app
notification) is a startling interruption. This has taught me to use the
do-not-disturb feature on my phone. Nothing of importance occurs from 9:00am –
12:00pm that needs my immediate attention. If there is an emergency with my kids,
the school will call my husband and if he calls me, the phone rings because I
allow it to. Everyone else’s agenda is not my problem.
Finally, there is a necessary transition that I have to go
through to be ready to receive my family when they come through the door. This
involves turning on music about 30 minutes before they arrive. It seems small,
but it makes the sound tsunami far less shocking to me when I do this. And if
they’re lucky, I’ll be dancing when they walk in the door and that will result
in everyone laughing. Laughter neutralizes the acid from any negativity that people
might be bringing with them. This is a positivity zone up in here.
Positivity with sarcasm sprinkled in for fun.
So far, I’m enjoying both the operatic score and the crystal
clear libretto of my day. It’s not a masterpiece, but at least I can hear it.
And the words I hear are all mine rather than Dick Wolf’s or whomever narrates House Hunters. It’s hard to hear your
own composition when you allow others’ to play in the background all the time.
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