The Silence

I remember a night just a few weeks after we brought Eleanor home from the hospital.  She had colic and screamed for hours on end.  This particular evening she had been wailing since long before I set supper on the table and as night fell there seemed no end in sight.  I bounced her and swayed and paced and sang every praise song I knew twice and there was still no respite from the noise.  As the last chorus of Sweet Hour of Prayer passed my lips, I broke.  I cried to God, "Please just quiet this child." The noise was too much; it had been almost constant since she was born.  Between tears and screams and lullabies and the vacuum that we ran in a desperate attempt to soothe the baby, my head ached for quiet, for peace.  "God, please let my next child be quiet..."


It was sunny when we rushed to the hospital to have Amelia.  We were laughing at a silly song E was singing.  Dave called his sisters.  I called my mom and Adrienne and the hospital.  We rushed into the labor room in a loud, chaotic whirwind.  E's ipad game whizzed and buzzed in the corner.  The nurse scurried about giving orders and trying to work around my incessant, nervous giggles.  I, of course, talked too much.  I always talk too much.  I jumped into the bed as she strapped the monitor around me and the first hint of silence fell.  There was nothing, no familiar swoosh, swoosh, swoosh.  Just the silence.

It's been there, the silence, since that sunny Friday.  It was masked at first by my loud, uncontrollable sobbing.  It was hidden behind the chorus of prayers and sweet concerns of friends.  I drowned it with ESPN because it's the only station I could be confident wouldn't play a Pampers commercial at 2 am.  Each card or visit or phone call helped hide it, but I knew it was there, waiting.  I dreaded the day it would move in for good.

The silence lives here now.  It hangs in Eleanor's room, mocking me when I check on one quiet child at midnight.  It lingers in my car as I hold my breath past the cemetery straining to hear ANYTHING that might bring peace.   It swells with every friend that hesitates to utter Amelia's name.  The silence is comfortable in part - a quiet, undemanding friend.  But mostly it's stifling.  I long to be able to walk back into our church sanctuary without feeling so obvious, so incomplete.  On Sunday mornings I can hear the band's praise music drift up the hallway toward my safe Sunday School classroom and my feet turn to enter.  But the silence wins.  The fear grips.  The panic overtakes and I run.  I run to my covers, to my seclusion, behind the doors, behind the walls, into the closet.  And I wait. I wait for the world to win.  I worry that Satan is proud.  Proud that he's kept me from church one more Sunday.  Proud that I'm not healed yet.

But silence is impressionable.  Deep in it's midst, wallowing in self pity, covered in shame, I remember those evenings of rocking E and begging for silence.  I remember rising at midnight and singing praise songs.  And the songs come back now.  Not out loud just yet, but lyrics swirl around my head....