How Only Children Float or Why I Learned to Drown in Chaos

How Only Children Float or Why I Learned to Drown in Chaos 

When I was growing up, it was a household of three: my Mom, my Dad and myself. My imagination had a fertile and nurtured ground to wander. I made up elaborate scenarios with seashells and barbies and notebooks filled with drawings. Boy, was it ever quiet. It was delightfully quiet. My mom was a hairdresser and had a shop in our basement so I would sit under her professional dryer and pull the alien mind zapping cone over my head and doze because that white noise can only be compared in my current life to a peanut butter dark fudge and caramel hot chocolate with whipped cream floating on top in heaps. Sometimes I would luxuriate languidly in the bathtub and lull myself to sleep with my head  underwater, ears  completely submerged and I could hear the faint hum of my parents talking over coffee in the kitchen downstairs or just hear my heart beating. I loved when my Mom would vacuum on a Saturday and 'sky rockets in flight...afternoon delight' would be rolling out over the stereo. I only recently realized that song is about having sex midday. That’s okay. It still follows my theme of relaxed, easy going, feeling good because you can hear yourself think type of groove. In my youth I associated noises with security, tranquility and slumber. 

In my house of the single child there was never any I HATE YOU, YOU ARE SO ANNOYING, tit for tat ratting each other out, or like the disturbing dueling banjos my two teen daughters do this really weird thing where they try to out-hum each other while sitting in the living room then act oblivious that they both are humming different songs but humming with a ferocity that should be saved for rap battles or acapella groups at the National Championships. It is like saying the ballerina was tiptoeing as hard as she could. You should never be trying to out-hum another person unless it’s a new Jimmy Fallon Late Night game a celebrity has to play like Water War or Telephone Booth. My very devilish oldest daughter has a propensity to repeat a sound that she finds charming over and over. Once she discovered how much this bugs me, she does it to see exactly how long until I blow up then drowns in a sea of hilarity. Remember when you had to take public speaking in high school and were required to do an impromptu speech in front of your amused peers for an ETERNITY or 5 whole real time minutes? Well to me, her repeating a sound like the mewing of a cat or a high pitched 'ping' sound for a mere 20 seconds IS exactly the same as when you thought you talked for an excrutiating 8 and an half minutes in public speaking but it was a actually a  jaunty minute forty five. With her PINGS, it feels like I have been holding out yelling SHUT UP for at least thirteen minutes, when in fact I waited about 14 seconds. 

My 8 year old son Ryan was recently diagnosed with complete hearing loss in one ear. Although he has Down Syndrome and everyone loves the stereotype that ALL CHILDREN WITH DOWN SYNDROME ARE HAPPY...I mean, that’s about as ridiculous as stereotypes like...I cannot even say because I would be labelled a bigot...that’s how ridiculous it is to give one characteristic to an entire group of human beings! So Ryan has complete hearing loss in one ear and probably mediocre hearing in the other and that’s why he has a complete BUY in the game of listening to his sisters bicker and yell. Aside from being slightly psychic and picking up on every nuance of feeling you have like an old, fat retired man waving a wand over the sand to find buried rings that fell off in the surf or coins that fell out of mesh beach bags, he probably doesn’t hear half the things that my super sonic mantaray hearing discovers in our household and for that he probably is very, very happy...down syndrome or not. Aside from his hearing loss, he does his fair share of stimming. For those who do not know, stimming is a repetitive action to self comfort. The one type of stimming he does that makes the most ruckus is very elaborate. In fact, he cannot even do this without my assistance so that explains my stance on parenting at times. If stimming equals I get a break, then stimming it is. I validate this by comparing stimming to my daughters playing Candy Crush or looking at what Kim Kardashian is doing on Instagram. It literally may be the same barely functioning level of brain activity. So in this elaborate stim that Ryan enjoys that I shamefully help him set up, I tie two helium balloons to a shoe, he places this contraption by a door at a very precise distance that only he understands (there is probably a blueprint in crayon somewhere under his bed) and he opens and slams the door at exact intervals while making a weird AHHHHHH sound the entire time. The point is that when he slams the door his balloon sways in the breeze. Did I mention the consistent slamming of the door sound and the AHHHHHH sound? There are many noises in homes with little boys with disabilities that are not in homes of only children. 

People think only children are spoiled rotten and never learn to share. I cannot vouch for whether or not I was affected by those qualities, but I do know that aside from getting angry when people make any audible chewing sound anywhere in the sonar of my hearing canal, I think I am fairly well adjusted. If karma is real, I share every dang thing I own and every free moment nowadays. I do need a respite from the noise at times in my household simply because I don’t understand how chaos equals normal growing up in such an orderly, quiet home, but there is a distinct sound that joy makes as well and that visits my hectic four person home here with as much frequency as it visited my placid childhood place in Penns Drive. The presence of joy in our home is blind to disabilities and missing masculine influences or big paychecks.  It is numb to whether there is a HD 40 inch deluxe flat screen television with full cable hook up in our living room or just a 20 something inch with rabbit ears cable. It doesn’t sense that my son sleeps in his little race car set up in my room because there are only three bedrooms in our rented apartment instead of the nice four bedroom house we used to own. It does HEAR a family that laughs their heads off together over youtube videos about guffawing goats, or hides behind doorways and scream bloody murder to scare one another then burst out laughing. It does hear giggling when we play spoons and someone rips a spoon out of someone else's hand at the last minute or we trip and make fun of ourselves endlessly about it. It HEARS a very noisy group of girls who talk in a crazy high affect to their little brother to let him know how excited they are when he repeats a word or does the 50 meter dash in Special Olympics.  

Even though this is not what I expected growing up "peacefully" as an only child, this chaotic house with myself and my three children is full of unexpected bolts of noise because love is the catalyst to sharp sparks of energy that set off a family's fireworks. The ruckus is raccous and colorful and oh so worth the spectacle!