A Little Bit of Silence

Here at cHaOs, we enjoy a little bit of silence as we prepare to enter Week 6 of #QuarantineLife. Yes, I just used a hashtag mid sentence. I’m sure my SEO will go nuts. Nevertheless, I sit in blessed silence while the rest of the house, well, rests. Silence is something that normally bothers me and induces a sort of mom-anxiety: clearly something is wrong if it is this quiet. Excpet, this time, nothing is wrong and I am allowed a moment of peace in the insanity that has ensued due to Covid-19 lockdowns.

I feel it is important to reiterate that my mental stability through this has been iffy, at best. I drink my coffee in the morning, attempt to school the children during the day while I work, and ‘write’ in the evenings. The word ‘write’ is put in little quotes because most of the time I sit and stare at the screen in a crippling paralysis of the brain that does not allow the words to flow. Why is this? I have the time… but not the quiet that normally goes with it.

The evenings don’t start until after dinner, the third meal cooked for the day. Sometimes there are games played downstairs while I try to concentrate. Other times there is a child sitting behind me while I try to work. And, on more occasions than not, everyone disperses and I still sit here staring at the screen with my characters screaming from the inside of my skull while my fingers do nothing but pop another appropriately named chocolate Pop’Ems into my mouth.

There have been several promotions for my published works – including the one still happening on Smashwords for my alter ego – that have mostly gone by the wayside because I sit with very little motivation to do much of anything but mindlessly sew several masks for people. In fact, I have a stack of fabric calling to my as I type this. It is being ignored because there is blessed silence in my house that I am afraid to break. I hold on to this tiny bit of silence in this time when silence is so rare, when the house is always full of people moving, working, playing, crying, laughing… living.

I sip my coffee and work on my novel outline so the edits and rewrites move in a smoother pattern. I remind myself that, yes, I did in fact pull something out for dinner despite the million leftovers sitting in the fridge – those will be eaten for lunch. I plug my ears with tiny buds that feed music to my brain so that creativity may flow freely in this time of blissful silence, this one tiny moment where cHaOs is actually contained.

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