Noise Violation

In a way, it’s exhilarating to witness such a pure expression of emotion. But in another way, our downstairs neighbors have complained about the noise.

Liz Sarb

My younger daughter came out screaming, and I mean screaming. Ear-splitting, room-clearing screams. It tracked, as an hour prior she had attempted to exit my body with such immediacy and force that I lost control of a few bodily functions (I’ll let you imagine which ones) and was myself screaming as the triage nurses rushed me to a delivery room. An epidural soothed me, and it stalled her, but not for long. Now I know that very few things can.

I didn’t expect this. In the 3D ultrasound photos we received midway through my pregnancy, she was smiling so peacefully, her skin smooth in the weird plasticky rendering. My sweet, serene baby! I thought. 

When the pandemic, along with my third trimester, began to hit its stride, my husband and I decided to name her June—a sign of spring, of hope. At that point everyone was still telling us the crisis would be over before her May due date. Of course, the party was only just getting started: by the time we brought her home, the world had shut down and we had to isolate for weeks. Mothers and newborns are always in their own little quarantine; stack the quarantines atop one another and the isolation is absolute. And in that void spoke a voice: June’s. She was the sound of our family from the moment she joined us.

We bought earplugs to protect our hearing from her furious cries at being set down on any surface that wasn’t our bodies. She made just as much noise during the rare hours she was asleep: when she was a few weeks old, we conceded that we could not sleep in the same room as her nighttime grunting and groaning, and banished her to a back bedroom that had a door to the outside. I worried aloud that someone would break in and snatch her in the night. “Don’t worry,” my husband reassured me. “They’d give her right back.” 

Now, at three years old, June is still a steamroller. Provide any grist to her mill and she will overrule you by speaking so loudly and insistently that you forget your initial point (or, if you’re me, dissolve into a puddle of helpless, frustrated laughter). She speaks in a voice like Andy Samberg’s Park Ranger Carl from Parks and Recreation. Or, have you seen the movie Looper, in which Emily Blunt’s character locks herself in a safe to protect herself from her child’s tantrum? That accurately captures the force of June’s rage. She locks eyes with her victim, opens her mouth wide, and takes a huge breath in. Then she unleashes, her whole body shaking as she screams. 

In a way, it’s exhilarating to witness such a pure expression of emotion. But in another way, our downstairs neighbors have complained about the noise. “When will your renovations be over?” they ask, wondering when we’ll move back into our house and finally give them some peace. In the meantime I teach June how to scream into a pillow; it has about a 25 percent success rate.

I should say here that I’ve never loved noise. I relate strongly to the meme that goes “I heard too many sounds at once and now I am a bitch” and to The Grinch, that misunderstood character, moaning “Noise, noooise, NOISE!” in his little Grinch-cave.

Maybe I have a faulty connection between my ears and my brain. My own voice, for example, sounds perfectly loud in my head but must disintegrate when it's exposed to the air. When I was in elementary school, I was routinely chastised for not speaking loud enough. “We can’t hear youuuu! Speak up!!” was a constant refrain. Inevitably I would blush, which would make it harder to speak, and eventually I decided it was easier to stay quiet. 

Instead of training my vocal chords, I learned how to expel my emotions through other outlets: piano, painting, and—gosh it’s hard to find a gentle way to put this into words so I’ll just say it plainly—carrying around a stuffed rat puppet and making it speak. Templeton was his name and pure gluttony and perversion were his game. He would say what I could not in a silly voice that masked his/my true intent. (In case you’re wondering, no, I was not sent to therapy. I have been to therapy in adulthood but we haven’t gotten close to touching the RAT PUPPET of it all; that probably would have been easier to explore at the time.)

That mild-mannered but secretly-quite-weird child turned into me, an outwardly-stable but inwardly-roiling-with-all-the-emotions adult. So it’s an education to mother June, whose thoughts and emotions are so seamlessly connected to her voice box. 

But here’s something I’ve noticed: she instinctively tamps herself down around non-family-members. All kids do this (Home is their safe space!, the experts say), but the difference here is especially stark. We asked her daycare teachers if she ever screamed or scratched in class and their shocked pause went on for an awkwardly long time. “If you described that child to me, I would never believe it was June!” one said eventually. I felt like replying, “Well believe it, lady!! I’m living with a feral badger that transforms into a doe-eyed angel child like she’s on the cover of an Animorphs book whenever she crosses your threshold!”

Should I be glad that she pulls herself together—and could even be described as quiet—in public? I’m not sure. I think back to grade-school-me, cheerfully torturing my parents with Templeton at home and then transforming into a Star Student at school. We all learn which parts of our personality play best to a crowd. 

In the days after June’s birth, every joint in my hands ached. This went on for so long that I worried her birth had triggered some sort of arthritis-like auto-immune response. But then I thought back to the delivery room. On my way there, rolling along in the hospital bed, 10 cm dilated and in the most ego-destroying pain of my life, I still worried about who could hear me screaming: other women in the triage rooms, catching an auditory glimpse of what their futures held; the nurses, who seemed shocked that I was in so much pain so suddenly (maybe I was making a big deal out of nothing?); my husband, whose eyes were huge with fear over his mask. 

So I turned inward. With each contraction, instead of screaming, I went further into my pain cave. Technically, I could have started pushing, but I wasn’t sure my body or mind would survive it. Mercifully, the anesthesiologist arrived and agreed to shoot me up. The epidural kicked in and I emerged from the cave, blinking in the harsh lighting. I looked down at my fingers and loosened their vise grip on the sheets. The shift changed and a new OB and nurse entered the room. “She’s sunny side up!” the OB said cheerfully. “You must have been in a lot of pain!” My husband and I looked at each other. I massaged my claws back into hands.

Sometimes I wonder what came first, June’s birth or her personality. Did her intensity dictate her birth story, or was it the other way around? Did she hear me screaming and assume that was the accepted mode of communication? Either way, it’s becoming clear that she and I are more alike than I thought, both of us adept at quieting ourselves for the outside world.

June doesn’t nap at home anymore (the curse of the three-year-old), so I try my hardest to institute Quiet Time for an hour after lunch. It’s a losing battle. But this afternoon, I peek into her room and see her arranging all the cards from a matching game into a giant, meticulously aligned grid. Her collection of Peppa Pig figurines stand in a perfectly straight line observing her progress. A box of Legos waits on the sidelines, on deck for when she’s finished with this activity. She is so perfectly two sides of the same coin: loud and quiet, chaos and order. 

I think about how even as their mothers, we never know our children’s true selves. Trying to assign characteristics to June is like spinning a coin; I can’t begin to predict which side will land up. All I can do is love the one she shows me. And if that means loving her loud voice and her screams—then I guess I’ll pop in my earplugs and help her with this Lego tower.