Shhhhhhhhhh! (Ruby)

First of all, you make me nervous, dear Patty, when you describe all the 6 lane highways you’ve navigated over the years. I don’t recall EVER driving on anything that vast…3 or 4 lanes at the most, but typically I drive on roads that have two lanes going each way and one is under construction, creating annoyingly long stretches of one thin lane. Then there are all the intentionally-single-lane “highways” that wind through little hills with bales of hay and scruffy barns; it took some getting used to that these were not considered “country lanes”...oh no, these are HIGHWAYS where you CAN and WILL cross the median, one inch to your left, if you blink. All in all, I loathe fast driving between trucks and have to psyche up for lane changes at a speed faster than 55…so kudos to you for not screwing up your 6 lane maneuver last month!

Okay, my mother lives where she lives in Connecticut because she enjoys the solitude that results from not having to see or hear her neighbors. She’s actually more social than I am, but when it comes to her home, she wants loads of privacy. Not me. I detest large, open spaces and want to know that there are plenty of people around me. When I think about living where my Mom lives, I get ugly pictures in my head about some wayward UPS delivery guy/murderer thinking he’s hit the jackpot when he sees how long my driveway is and is tickled to know that no one would ever hear me screaming, in all that wooded tangle, when he pulls out his trusty axe…classic wanderings of my mind. I was terrified to move into our first house after years of apartment dwelling with Scot; too much space, too many doors, far too many opportunities for the obvious…INVASION.

However, there is a downside to the cozy neighborhoods that I prefer and it has to do with the words that we say and the sounds we make. We can hear our neighbors YAWN. Which means that they can also hear us yawn, or for instance, scream at our children…our desperate attempts at good parenting, soured by the ugly fact that our kids walk by us with their fingers in their ears saying “lalalalala”, not hearing most of what we are begging them to do or not do. Which only makes us get louder. My kids ask me why I always have to scream everything I say and I yell back “…BECAUSE YOU NEVER LISTEN WHEN I SAY IT NICELY THE FIRST 20 TIMES!!!!!!”

I’ve thought for years that we must sound like we live in emergency mode most of the time, and partly because of our non-verbal severely autistic 18 yr. old who can make every-day stuff feel so “matter-of-life-and-death-ish”. Like any of the times we found our front door open, which would mean he’d found a carefully hidden key and decided to wander. Screams echoing throughout the neighborhood: “OH MY GOD!!!!WHY IS THE FRONT DOOR OPEN?? WHAT’S GOING ON?!!WHERE’S KIER?? DAAAAADDY? LOOK UPSTAIRS!! CALL THE POLICE!! LOOK DOWNSTAIRS!! CALL MOMMY AT WORK!!!!!!” Or the time when we could see Kier in the backyard and could see the dog’s tie-out leash draped over the 6-foot fence…when Kier decided to toss the dog over our fence into the neighbors yard. Hmmm, well I hollered SHIIIIIIIIITTT!! so loud when I figured out what this visual meant that I could have compromised hearing across the city of Madison (doggy was fine…turns out the leash was long enough for her to scamper and frolic in the neighbor’s yard...but I was sure she’d be hanging from a noose...lifeless) Or any of the times the ENTIRE family has had the stomach-flu and our neighbors got to listen to the screeching, bellowing, dying sounds of…(vomiting…shhhhh).

Then I added this to my list of embarrassing things my neighbors got to hear me say/do: Montserrat and Atticus have been told (repeatedly) not to play with this wobbly, teetering ladder that went with an above-ground pool we had for one summer, (before we saw raccoons lounging in it at night…ewww) which means that these boys LOVE to play on it, in spite of our pleas (fingers in ears – lalalalala). So when they thought I wasn’t looking, they scurried on up that ladder to stage its collapse, making themselves fall off of it on purpose, just letting it sway pathetically to the ground, spilling their bodies randomly. I try to never watch boys play because of this; all I can think of is the risk, the injury, the certain death….the dirt. Then I noticed that they were also spraying each other with gigantic super-soaker water guns, upping the ante, ensuring sudden knee jerk reactions to the spray AS they were falling…..and I SHRIEKED at them “PUT THE GUNS DOWN & GET OFF THE LADDER!!!!!!!!!! Hmmm.

Who doesn’t say THAT to their kids….?

Hey, don’t worry about me…winter in Wisconsin is an unusually L~O~N~G season. Thankfully, our windows are closed tight for 7 or 8 months and no one has to know that we even live here let alone that we spend our days and nights screaming, fighting, chewing with our mouths open, vomiting…or yawning.

Ruby