Background Noises

I’m writing this from bed. It’s well past my six-year-old’s bedtime, yet she’s in the middle of performing a play she’s making up as she goes. She’s wearing a sequin skirt, brandishing a hiking stick, and delivering her lines with the kind of conviction only a child can muster.

I haven’t eaten dinner and, honestly, I probably won’t. Part of me longs for silence. The other part wants to stay right here, completely absorbed in her world of imagination and glitter and make-believe.

Today has been full—back-to-back meetings, more than two hours in the car, packing lunches, prepping for tomorrow, managing a thousand invisible tasks. And now, this play. This beautiful, chaotic, unscripted performance that somehow sums up motherhood perfectly: exhaustion and magic coexisting in the same breath.

When is there time to think? To decompress? Why does everything have to be so loud all the time? Maybe the real trick isn’t finding quiet, but learning to see the beauty in the noise.