Tell Me Everything
We worry so much about babies talking. Then we spend the rest of their childhoods wishing they would hush.
The chatter comes from every direction.
She was fifteen months old and quiet in the backseat of our sedan.
“Mmah?” she’d squeak, now and again. Pinging, my husband called it. A quick sonar to confirm the responsiveness of the adult up front.
“How was your day, baby?” I asked, reversing out of her babysitter’s culdesac.
Silence.
“Someday,” I said, “You’ll tell me every little thing.”
As I write this, my now eight-year-old reads next to me under the condition that she is not allowed to talk. She has already broken this condition twice because she desperately needs to tell me about something that happened in her book.
And now I must pause because she wants to tell me the title of every book in the series and the order in which she is reading them.
We worry so much about babies talking: “Has he said his first word?” “Is she talking yet?” “How many words does she have?”
Early last summer, when our youngest started Early On to address a speech delay the intake coordinator asked “Is he stringing two words together, like ‘Love you?’” I snorted out loud. He didn’t have two words to string together, unless you counted “Uh” and “Oh.”
Now, not even a year later, he strings many words together. Then he ties a neat knot at the end of these strings with an ear splitting banshee-scream of delight. He smiles his winning smile and we wonder if we could ask Early On to put some of his words back.
We know where this is going. His older brother chatters incessantly. But “talking” is different than “telling” and he tells us very little – just long rambling stories with whatever vocabulary sluices through his mind. Stink bug. Lion. Bones. Babies. Nonno. The lines on my face etch deeper as I lean in and try to understand what the hell he is actually trying to say.
I anticipate the toddler will progress in much the same way. Then we will have a two-year-old, four-year-old, and eight-year-old talking at us at in different levels of language while the seven-year-old makes weird truck noises.
We worry so much about babies talking. Then we spend the rest of their childhoods wishing they would hush.
My work – the work that helps to support these same chatty kids – requires deep thought. It also requires meetings. So I come to the end of my workdays with not much brainpower left over for social interactions or the processing of never ending words. It leaves me, to put it mildly, irritable.
I genuinely want them to tell me every little thing. I desperately want them to shut the fuck up.
“Oh my God” I murmur to myself over their shrieking as I set the dinner table. “Shut the fuck up.”
“Fuck,” enunciates the four year old.
“Hey! NO! Do not say that word!”
“You say-ed it mommy. You teached it to me.”
Fuck, enunciates my mom-guilt. But I’m also pleased by how calmly and clearly he communicated the blame.
We wish so much for quiet: “Say excuse me,” “Wait your turn,” “Hush.” Then we spend their adolescence prying out their thoughts.
I know that this noisy stage won’t last. It will come and go as quickly as those pings my daughter once cast from her rear facing car seat. All four of them will revert, one by one, from telling us every little thing to shooting us dark looks (or texts if we’re lucky). Their prattle will dry up.
Such is parenting. I can’t stop it. I don’t even want to. Every little thing is too much.
It’s too much, and I crave it. It’s too much, and I’ll miss it. So here’s my message to you, little ones: I - and your dad - do try to hear you. Even when we’re shushing you, or muttering rude things under our breath, we are trying. And for as long as you’re willing to share, we’ll be listening to every little thing that matters deeply to you: the plot of your book, the stink bug in your room, the type of truck you imagine yourself to be.
