Lima Beans and Silence

Excuse me for typing slowly, I'm trying to see myself in the computer monitor.

Because I'm sure that if I turn my head to the right and lift up the hair on the left side of my head, I'll see a vein the size of a screw you spell check, I'm NOT capitalizing the name of a bean lima bean throbbing and undulating like it's trying to do something on Dancing With The Stars. And this lima-bean-vein is very social, because everything makes it recruit other lima beans in my head and gets them all to dance more vehemently in a cacophonous non-rhythm... everything.

The light, the fan blowing on my neck, the fact that my son wants to watch either Twister, or Ironman or Transformers and will probably con hubby into putting on one of them despite my wanting to hear nothing more decibel-laden than James Taylor, who has never ever heard of bass, God Bless Him, turned up to barely a whisper, or better yet nothing coming from the speakers. But hey, that's not a luxury that mothers get. Silence.

Silence, (and I'm not talking about 'trouble silence', that's a completely different experience filled with a tense hospital-or-homicide feel to it) honest, relaxing, the kids didn't set the house on fire silence... that is the grand prize jackpot of the Mama-lottery. Which is why it is so coveted, so revered. The odds of getting it are astronomical. You'd have better odds trying to be the single ticket winner of the Mega Million when the jackpot is over 400 million.

And just like said mythical Mega-jackpot, mothers who get good silence don't know what the hell to do with it.

Oh, we think we will, when we're surrounded with shrieking running kids and movies with action scenes that make the dishes fall out of the kitchen cabinets and husbands cutting sheet metal right outside the door, right next to the pride of cats in heat. In those moments we think we would know what to do in the mythical blissful silence. We'd lay on our the-house-is-spotless couch with our feet up, eating the best cheesecake ever and sipping it down with Martha-Stewart-loves-this-coffee coffee in the pin-drop Silence and possibly read the most incredible book without interruption. No one trying to get some of the cheesecake off of your plate. No one asking you to refill their Martha coffee. No one turning the stereo or TV on so loudly that your fillings fall out. No kids tearing through the house chasing the dog with the jar of peanut butter. We would just sit and drink in the serenity of silence. No one to bother us!

Until one mark-it-on-the-calendar day, when we get it. The house is clean, the hubby and the kids and the peanut-butter-covered dogs and the fertile cats are all GONE. And you're left in that Valhalla as mythical as Atlantis... Silence.

And we're out of cheesecake, because you didn't know the Silence was coming. So there's no point in making another pot of coffee cause you don't have anything decadent you need to wash it down with, besides it's too close to bedtime. So you sit anyway, with your feet up, but you just finished your book and there's nothing good on TV that everyone would give you crap about trying to watch, so you don't even bother with it, cause you're not even in the mood for Pretty Woman. Besides, you're drinking in the silence, right, so why clutter it with noise, even if it's Mama noise... But you've got nothing to do, and that just doesn't seem natural, so you close your eyes and try to meditate, cause you read The Secret last week...

Next thing you know, you're toddler is jumping in your lap with sticky hands and your hubby is turning on Pink Floyd to see if the alarm clocks ring out of all five speakers and the dog is tracking mud all through the was-clean house, and the cats are outside the nearest window making a porno, and the phone is ringing because Real Life has returned and completely decimated the ethereal Silence...

Which you completely missed... because you fell asleep... since you didn't have your coffee and cheesecake and the most engrossing book... and you didn't know what the hell to do in the Silence to honor and treasure it's fragile beauty.

It was actually a little spooky not having some noise anyway. It had been built up to such mythic proportions in your mind that you were intimidated in it's presence. You're almost relieved to have the noise back...

Almost.

Maybe you'd just settle for not having a lima bean in your head turn into an anurism.