If I only had a brain

I’m not sure what happened tonight.  There must have been some sort of disruption in the solar system or fracture deep in the Earth’s core because somehow, I was allowed to leave the house for a blissful 5 ½ hours without children. 

Imagine a drive without bickering, twenty peaceful minutes without anyone calling my name, ten glorious miles without hearing a single song by The Wiggles or Veggie Tales.

It was like one of those sci-fi shows where they talk about anomalies and blips in the space-time continuum.  I’d been transported back in time, to the eerily quiet era before I had kids, while at the same time remaining at my current age, possessing the ability to appreciate the magnitude of getting five minutes of silence.

I don’t know what it is about kids, but there just always seems to be so much noise.   Even when they aren’t talking, which is almost never, there just seems to be some sort of sound emanating from them at all times.    Laughing, crying, screaming, fighting, whining, babbling, shrieking .   Tapping, drumming, scraping, jingling, stomping, banging, clapping, sloshing, slurping, thumping, rattling, or squeaking.   And those are just the sounds they can make without toys.  Add a few batteries to the mix and you’ve got enough baby dolls crying, toy dogs barking, lasers blasting and sirens blaring to drown out any intelligent thought you ever managed to string together for more than three seconds.

Sometimes the noise becomes so deafening that your nervous system is threatened with a complete meltdown if you should hear even one more small peep out of anybody.     It would stand to reason then, that with 5 1/2 hours to bask in joyous silence, a mom would be able to regroup and think through and solve all the problems that have been plaguing the family for months.   Shoot, with over 5 hours, you should be able to mentally rearrange the kids' rooms to make all their stuff fit inside their four walls, tweak that recipe that's been on your mind for 8 months, figure out what went wrong in last month's budget, plan several creative activities to keep the kids busy next week, take a mental inventory of calories and come up with a workout plan, create no less than five fun games for the class party and maybe even have time left over to start composing a bit of that novel you've always dreamed of writing.

It's a mystery then, that when you turn the key and pull out of the garage, you travel 9 blocks before you even realize you're driving or that you don't remember the last 5 stop signs.  You suddenly become aware, not only of your surroundings, but that your 5 1/2 hours on the clock has been ticking down already and you've lost precious quiet time.  You gather your wits about you, determined to think about important things, big things, adult things.   Then you travel another 6 blocks, realize you've done it again and make a more focused decision to pay attention.  After you've repeated this process about 5 times, you begin to smack your head against the steering wheel trying to jump start your brain. 

You are an adult.  Surely you have important things to think about and a wee bit of will power and self discipline will do the trick.  You try again, only to find that you can not concentrate on even one line of thought at a time.  By the time you berate yourself, an hour and a half is wasted. Okay, positive thoughts, you tell yourself.  You can do this. One task at a time.  Two hours later, you are at your wits end, sipping a frappuccino from the coffee shop drive through and hoping the caffeine will help your brain.  Another hour goes by and though you are now wired, you have yet to complete a single thought.  That's when the psycho analysis begins.   It must be something from your own childhood that causes you to lock up in a quiet atmosphere.  That has to be it.   There has to be a reasonable explanation.  After all, you're a grown woman with many important things on your mind.  And yet, at five hours in, not one of those important things seems to have surfaced.

With only a half hour left to go, you feel the onset of panic.  And then it hits you.  The problem is not you.  It's them.   Those tiny little people who follow you around throughout the week making so much noise that your brain has to restart every 2.2 seconds to absorb a new noise and try not to explode.  The constant rewiring of your circuits that keeps power going to all the right places instead of causing actual smoke to come out of your ears is great for safety, but not so much for your sanity.  You see, your brain, after children, is like a pinball getting whacked by a flipper every other second.  Just when you find your groove, something knocks the sense out of you, ricochets you off several obstacles and then drops you back down, ready to roll along in unsuspecting bliss for another half second.   You can no longer think - at all.

As the weight of this realization hits you and the clock taunts you, you do what any mom with only twenty minutes left would do.   You pull up to Baskin Robbins, order three scoops and then sit in your car and cry.

Five and a half hours.  Gone, just like that.  You will return home to the chaos having solved nothing, no Nobel Peace Prize in the works and no more illusions of seeing your name in print at the bookstore.   You wipe your tears.  You sigh.  You try to look at the bright side.   While it may take you a while to grieve the loss of a fully functioning brain, at least you did get out for a few hours.   And for once, you didn't have to share your ice cream with anybody.