If you could hear the whispering of the dream, you would hear no other sound. - Kahlil Gibran
“Mama, there’s no sound.” My daughter and I were eating dinner when she made this observation in an amazed whisper. The peace had been achieved at a price. Fifteen minutes earlier, I’d exiled my son to his room after a meltdown involving Power Rangers and green beans. The lack of wailing from above indicated that he’d fallen asleep. Sitting there with my hands still clenched in tight frustration, however, I hadn’t noticed. When Tobey is unhappy, he can scream and pout with the best NBA player. When he’s happily entranced in play, he makes almost as much noise, spitting and spewing the hiss of a rocket, the roar of a dragon, the squeal of a race car.
Bella was right—the hush was remarkable. Given how much I crave quiet, I should have noticed it sooner. I’m convinced that my writing, and thus my life, would be greatly improved if I had just one completely peaceful hour each day. I feel the same way about clean floors. But I’ve learned to live with dog hair and dust balls, just as I’ve learned to live with a certain amount of acoustic clutter.
Noise was one of my biggest concerns when deciding whether to have children. Their high-pitched voices, which seem to follow no predictable pattern—a yelp or a yowl can come at any moment—made me anxious. I told my husband that he and our future children could have the house; the dog and I would retreat to a mountainside monastery. “We’ll visit often,” I promised.
Of course, I’ve discovered that it’s easier to tolerate the staccato of one’s own children. But no matter how used to the cacophony of childhood one becomes, it’s still exhausting and antithetical to the kind of focus that creative work demands.
It makes sense to define silence as a negative state, as a lack of noise, which is how the hush of our house struck Bella. But that would be like discounting cellular activity just because we can’t see it. Consider a painter serenely at her easel or a mathematician in concentration at her computer. In both tableaus, there is analysis and critical thinking occurring: where to place the next line, which symbol comes next. But there’s also reverie and meditation. In order to create, we need space (silence and space often become synonymous in the harried mother’s vocabulary) for our minds to wander, stretch, and stumble over variations of phrases and images that can’t occur when we quickly and efficiently scoop up the first “answer” that comes to mind.
My friend Tilly Woodward, a painter, says that when she is working background noise falls away. “I make my own kind of silence. It becomes about my relationship to the painting, which in turn is a conversation about my relationship to the world, which is louder than anything else around me.” This kind of creative noise is akin to getting lost in order to find one’s way. And it’s really, really hard to do when someone needs you to wipe their behind or make mac and cheese.
So you have to get clever. In her essay, “Not a Perfect Mother,” poet Stephanie Brown writes, “It’s hard to write and to have kids. Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s not. You cannot get lost in the easy wind and downy flake of motherhood and then turn around, focus, and produce work. You have to be cunning, practical, and selfish. You have to steal time. Time is your enemy, your gift, your wanton desire, and you will never have enough of it.”
I know all about being practical (see the last column: “Mothers of Invention: Pragmatic Choices") and selfish, but cunning? I like that. Cunning means hiding out at a friend’s house when she’s out of town in order to steal twelve hours of uninterrupted work. It means saving the kids’ movie rental for the hour prior to the deadline. For Tilly, it meant tricking out her studio with toys, a VCR, and a kids’ art table. As her kids grew, she moved her painting studio into the living room so that she could have more space while also keeping an eye on them while they worked on the computer or hung out with friends.
Many mothers fondly remember the early days of napping for the golden nuggets of time in which to get The Work done. But just as strong is the memory—a physical sensation, really—of the waking baby. Artist Jane Pollack describes it as “that little ‘unh-unh’ sound that felt like a knife cutting through the solace of my creative time.” And she’s just talking about a kid’s natural sleep cycle; God help the FedEx guy who rings the doorbell and sets the dog to barking.
While it’s hard to find creative fodder in a baby’s shriek or an adolescent’s whine, there is something to be said for happy noise. When my kids are playing well with each other, the sound may be loud, but it’s not abrasive. Their happy noise is a reminder to the introvert in me that plenty of creative endeavors take place in clanging, singing, tapping environments. Theater productions, big city newsrooms, rock bands, and even quilting circles all hum.
In addition to teaching art at a small liberal arts college, Tilly also runs a multi-age art center for her small town of Pella, Iowa. It’s a truly remarkable place: the bottom floor of an old high school crammed with charcoals, markers, and paints; buttons, wallpaper scraps, and wire; a potting wheel, a darkroom, and sewing machines. Add in kids from elementary through high school and the place can get pretty raucous. “I’ve learned to like the noise a lot,” she says. “In some ways, noise equals work.”
Culturally, we’re wired to prefer noise. (The fact that many of us walk around literally wired proves this.) Silence can be uncomfortable. Too much of it, and we grab for the remote control or the phone. For an artist, silence is also a signal that it’s time to get to business. When faced with a silent house, I can do a load of laundry and putter in the kitchen only so long before the quiet nearly demands that I get to work. (Notice that laundry is a form of procrastination; writing is The Work.)
Though the stillness of a single evening can be a gift—the wanton desire described by Brown—too much of it can be overwhelming. My kids are still quite young, but already I fear the silence of their departure, just as I once feared their noise.
Last summer, with her daughter away at an internship, Tilly drove her high school-aged son to Chicago for a flight to Spain. “I was feeling okay about it until he passed through the security gates at O’Hare and turned out of sight,” she remembers. “I suddenly realized that I was going to walk back to the car, and drive home, and be by myself for two weeks. It was really scary.”
No matter our desire for a moment alone, as mothers, we are called on so frequently, in urgency and joy, that abrupt silence is jarring. The void of children’s voices leads us to wonder what we’re good for. And yet something does summon us. Our creative work offers an ongoing conversation. Listen, you can hear it calling.