ARWYN DAEMYIR
hAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU, happy birthday to you …
I don’t hear the words, just a seven-note MIDI, over and over and over. It’s preprogrammed on an electronics kit my sister-in-law sent for Christmas, and my five-year-old has figured out how to get it to play on continuous loop. We have a small house, and the playroom is right in the middle: I cannot escape it. I can just hear its tinny drone in the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom. My eye started twitching an hour ago; my hands are tense, turning to fists in my mind, and I force them flat in reality. There’s not a jury in the country that would convict me! Like all not-quite-jokes, this one sits brittle in my head; the laughter in my mind is as sharp and off-key as the—let’s be charitable—“tune” my child happens to be obsessed with today.
I let my shoulders pull all the way up to my ears, tight, tight, tighter, then exhale and release . . .
• • •
The birthday song has never been kind to us. Unlike at my child’s first four birthdays, he allowed us to sing it to him this year, five candles flickering in our tiny dining room, his dad’s voice and mine warbling through the all-too-familiar song. Half a dozen times that day I’d had to explain to outsiders, No, please stop, I know it’s kindly meant, but really, I need you to stop: he’s only going to listen to it once, and you’re not the one who gets to sing it. Sorry, Grandma, teacher, waiter, friends.
But it’s better this year than before, better to have him clamp his hands over his ears as he waits semi-patiently through unexpected renditions than his screams of terror at one year old, his screams of anger at two and three, celebrating only in secret at four to avoid any risk of someone starting to sing. He’s never been a fan—of the song or the singing—until now.
Some people think our ban on electronic gizmos and noisemakers is a “crunchy” choice, a holier-than-thou allegiance to Waldorf or Montessori or some other exclusive philosophy. Sure, we get the Nova Naturals catalog, I know what anthroposophy is, and I can drool over math manipulatives with the best of them: It’s an easy enough mistake to make. But the truth is much simpler, much less smug, and just a bit uglier. The truth is, it’s quite clear where my child’s aversion to crowds of people singing at him comes from, if I am at all willing to look in the metaphorical mirror.
Before having kids, I never thought of myself as having noise issues. The electronics ban, instituted before the first baby showers could bring the plastic and solder and silicon into our house, came from a lifetime of living with migraines, knowing that the last things I needed were flashing lights, electronic beeps and sirens, and an endless loop of tinny, tuneless “songs.” Sensory stuff was my dad’s thing, with his (then-undiagnosed) Asperger’s; I may have inherited his mood swings, and okay, some of his volatility, but I wasn’t like that. I didn’t plug my ears in theaters and brag that my favorite TV channel was “off” and hit the mute switch first on every remote and gadget in my environment, and if I couldn’t focus at my friend’s house when the TV and the radio were both on and her mom was on the phone, well, that was only because I was accustomed to my dad’s silent domain. Right?
Or maybe not. Maybe it took over a quarter of a century living in this noise-filled world, took parenting a child who needed airplane headphones to cut down the noise in everyday situations, and took rather more therapy than I’d care to admit, to figure out just how much auditory overwhelm runs in my family. Because I am a miserable and miserably bad parent when there’s too much of the wrong kind of noise. Yelling and screeching, doors slamming, feet stomping.
That’s me, not the kid.
The kid sometimes too. No, Teacher, I have no idea why he might think it’s okay to slam the school door when he’s having a difficult day. Sorry, we’ll talk with him about it. Of course.
Like electricity, noise unbound—or wielded without care for my idiosyncrasies—is what sears; channeled and harnessed and directed by me it can soothe, give me power and strength and control. A memory: at my desk, twenty-nine other college-aspiring students around me, all bent over a particularly bothersome semi-final. I had a chain dog leash with me and kept dropping it into my hand, over and over, to hear the way it ting’ed together, a lovely cascade that anchored me, soothed my body so my mind could work. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until one of the kids next to me hissed “Arwyn! Quit it!” and I startled out of volumes and limits and into covert glares and annoyed huffs, and put it away, cheeks burning, mind unmoored.
Now my child is the one holding the leash, experimenting with electricity, and it undoes me. I can’t always know when it’s going to become too much, and usually can’t recognize when it has reached that threshold until after the fact, after the explosion, the yelling, the slamming, the snapping and “no!”ing and sarcasm flung at my child like stones. It starts in my neck, my body straining to retreat inside a shell it’s never had. My shoulders creep up, my back rounds, my vision narrows, and my breath races high in my chest—no longer its usually slow, deep wave, but a shallow, strained pulling, out, out, get me out, make it stop!
Sometimes, unrecognizing, unthinking, I try to make it stop, make him stop, make the world stop, shout stop! Sometimes I am a shitty parent. Shit happens.
But sometimes—ah, sometimes, I stop. Mama mama mama! And I breathe. That’s not fair, I hate you, I’ll never brush my teeth again! And I bring my attention to how my breath feels trapped, my chest tight. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! I feel the strain from pulling away, pulling back and out and down—anywhere-but-here. Clomp, stamp, bounce, kick kick kick kick kick kick kick kick. And I say, I need a break. Or I say, Hey, did you hear that? Or I say, I heard you say you wanted that. Or I say nothing, and be here instead, be still, be with him, be eyes that see him and arms that are hugs in potentia, and a body that knows—that knows—exactly what it is to feel overwhelmed and out of control and stuck in a world too loud, too big, too fast, too much, to be seeking for control, for power of one’s own, and then, oh, then my heart breaks—breaks open, breaks boundaries, breaks free—and I am exactly, exactly the parent he needs me to be.
Happy birthday to you…
I go into the playroom. He’s on his bed, snapping still more extraneous connections on to the already overcompleted circuit.
“Heya kiddo.” Would you mind if I smashed that to tiny plastic pieces? No. I breathe.
“I hear you managed to get it to play without the voice activator. How’d you do that?”
I clear a space and sit down next to him, his excited explanatory babble washing through me, washing me out. The music stops and starts again as together we discover exactly which parts of the circuit are superfluous, which necessary.
This connection is necessary: his and mine, me to him, us to now. This connection doesn’t cut the noise, but cuts through it, making a path for me to come inside with him, where it is sound, not noise; power, not lightning. He learns from what I do, learns not just the stomping off and slamming doors—and far too many obscenities—but also this, centering and listening and being here now. I cannot say which is more important, that it serves me or that through me it serves him; we two, and our best goods, are inseparable, indissoluble, and in this moment, serenaded by a stupid seven-note song, this truth has never been clearer. I am calm, and so he calms; he calms, and so I do, too.
We live surrounded by crackling static, he and I, too much noise and too many voices and tunes that turn to pain, and I am proof, like my father before me, that though he may abandon the so-stylish headphones, he may never outgrow their need. But I will sit with him, in the loudness of his world, and we will explore its edges together.