We all need quiet sometimes.
I wrote this while my 1-year-old was walking around and banging a drum and my 3-year-old was singing Moana music at the top of his lungs on the day after Halloween.
I did not know how much I need quiet to recharge until after I had kids. Perhaps that was poor timing, but it’s what I got.
My kids can *seem* like they don’t need quiet, but they do. People are never static – we ebb and flow and need both noise and quiet. That balance makes sense to me. The hard part for me is gauging how much noise and how much quiet I need (and my kids need).
Unlike, say, sleep where I can just look at a clock and have a sense of how much I’m getting, noise is more amorphous. There is always some amount of sound, and I don’t carry a sound-level meter on my person (dibs on personal sound-level meters as the next trend in wearables!). Sound is not black-and-white, and I can’t rely on external cues to tell me what to do. I have to trust myself and my own experience. Which is…hard. But I’m working on it.