On Quiet Read online

  In the churches, these coracles of solace, I am brought down into stillness by a spiritual enveloping from a mostly sung service. I feel lit. As I do in the wild places, where the silence hums—Antarctica’s ice desert, central Australia’s sand desert, under a full butter moon. Sometimes I feel so silted up by the great rambunctiousness of city living. I am grubbied and depleted, and I need the cleanness of something hymnal. A tuning fork back into quietude.

  Places of potent spirituality do not belong entirely to this earth. They are the sites that concentrate your being in some way, that soften your presence into something ceremonial and inclusive, with some echo of an ancient ritual embracing you.

  Like the Aboriginal people who get sick if removed from their land, I crave the wild places of home, for they are my medicine for replenishing quietude.

  IV

  I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature’s only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise.

  Wilkie Collins

  Instinctively children are the escapes—plants that colonise places where they are not meant to. They surrender more readily to nature, and to the nurture of quiet.

  For years I didn’t have a mobile phone. I wanted to cave myself in quiet for as long as I could and I was fearful of how it would affect my writing. It was difficult to explain. ‘How am I meant to communicate with you?’ one friend barked. ‘But your kids will never get playdates,’ fumed another, ‘we ALL text.’ By this point this friend was shouting without realising.

  The power of quiet is compelling in a child. Those that have mastered a withholding, a watching silence, are intriguing. Their stillness draws others to them; they’re noticed. They’re often popular in the playground, alluring, cool; others crave the gift of their attention. Quietness should not be perceived as weird or wrong; it can be strong and self-contained, centred and courageous. The quiet children feel like they absorb the most. They can present themselves as the intriguing eye of the storm, and I envy the poise of it.

  It is possible to be a quiet leader. A quiet doer. A quiet achiever. Despite what the world tells us now.

  One terrible morning a decade or so ago I realised my world was too crowded. I received three phone calls on the landline just before bundling the kids into the car for the run to two schools. The calls held me up; I hadn’t managed my breakfast let alone the galvanising lipstick. My head was swamped with impending playdates and deadlines and I’d had too much wine at a dinner party the night before followed by a fractious sleep.

  I bustled squabbling kids in the car and folded the stroller, smartly scrunched it down with a Blundstone-booted foot and hauled it into the boot. I heard a faint squeak. The stroller was responding. Oh my God, my God. I rushed it open to find a baby inside. Doubled over, stunned, her dear little back possibly cracked.

  I’ve never held a child so fiercely. Trembling, I ran my hands over her body and skull. She was fine. The love, the horror, the guilt. Quietly I took a very deep breath, and strapped my precious baby into her car seat. Again and again, before my eyes, was that vision of a shoe curtly ramming the stroller shut; the sickening heft of it. And I realised that my life was too noisy, in too many ways, and this was endangering all of us.

  I’ve been trying to clear the decks ever since. Learning the power of no: the release in the polite refusal. To reap the rescuing quiet.

  In the cram of motherhood you lose who you are because you’ve given yourself over so completely to someone else. It’s hard to find a quietude in that.

  ‘Life should be touched, not strangled,’ professed writer Ray Bradbury. It’s particularly apt in this age of micro-managed parenting. Why is it so hard for our noisy modern generation to relinquish control of its offspring? To trust?

  The NSW Teachers Federation has pleaded with parents to back off. They say a minority of outraged parents, with their sense of indignant righteousness, are creating chaos. Turning up uninvited during school hours; doorstopping teachers in class; yelling, bullying, even physically assaulting them. Where is the parents’ sense of quiet containment?

  I’ve heard a familiar refrain from various mums recently: ‘I went mad.’ With it comes a chill of recognition, for I have too, once or twice. I’m not proud of those moments, tangled up in the minutiae of my child’s world. I am less that way now, mercifully, and I just don’t enjoy the stew of the mummy madness anymore, where you’re held hostage over some perceived unfairness, real or imagined. It’s never been my better self; that person who’s removed, sleepless and anxious, an outlier in their own lonely orbit and ridiculously unquiet.

  Parenting experts blame the obsessive, noisy and hovering way of mothering on smaller families, which leads to increased expectations on their children, heightened anxiety about results and older, vocal mothers who are used to getting their way in the workplace and translating that to the classroom.

  The quietness that comes with letting go what you cannot change.

  Both a child psychologist and a psychiatrist I know mentioned, in passing, ‘No one goes to church anymore.’ Meaning, there’s no communal guidance now for ways of behaving in a quieter way; no teaching a sense of how to be, which in the past led to an acceptance of authority and restraint. With our kids, we’ve never had so much freedom in terms of parental ways of behaving and thinking, and we’ve never clung on so noisily and so tight.

  The child’s will is like an eel, constantly slipping from our grasp. And letting go of them—to fail, to work it out for themselves—isn’t always a sign of weakness but of its opposite, strength. You’re releasing the other person but more importantly, you’re releasing yourself. Into quiet.

  Is it the loss of control that makes parents do it? Stress, or exhaustion or a feeling of sheer helplessness? Perhaps it’s a combination of all three? Physically lashing out at our children, smacking them. Australia stands alongside the US in not banning smacking in order to send a clear message to an unruly child. But what kind of message is it?

  It’s about noisome stress. The sense of erasure the parent feels, immersed in a world that’s constantly challenging, exhausting and blindsiding them—things not going their way, people not obeying their authority. When we can’t control what we think is our right to, we get stressed—and colliding, sometimes catastrophically with that, is the loss of control that is parenthood.

  It’s a state of siege. I know that now. Mainly chosen, welcomed, revelled in, of course; but a siege nonetheless. Oh, for quietude’s replenishing bliss.

  It is a spare desk. A tidy house; everything neat and straight and in its place. I need order and calm to think. And every Monday morning there’s a vast reordering of the house, into calm, after the whirlwind of the weekend’s chaos. Only then can I sit at my desk and recalibrate with work. That makes me strong, spines me up.

  Singer Adele, after having her baby, said that eventually she decided she was going to give herself one afternoon each week just to do whatever the fuck she wanted—without her baby. And that a friend of hers said, ‘Really? Don’t you feel bad?’

  She replied that she did—but not as bad as she’d feel if she didn’t do it. Adele explained that four of her friends felt the same way but they were too embarrassed to talk about it; they thought everyone would think they were a bad mum.

  But that just isn’t the case. Adele said it makes you a better mum if you give yourself a better time.

  I feel like I’m living spiritually when I’m working; absorbed, focused, lit. When I can’t glean the space to sit at my laptop, I feel fretful and angry, lost. The writer Gail Collins said that, for women, the ‘centre of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home, and the urge to get out of it.’ It’s her story, my story, the female story. The complex annihilation of motherhood.

  The shiver of a thrill is as great as the arrival of the purple Malvern Star dragster I received, aged eight. Another such arrival enters my world, years later. In the Cabinet of Extraordinary Pu
rchases that make up a life, this new acquisition is not glamorous, nor tender, nor beautiful. It is black and ugly and it squats in smug collusion under my desk, like an evil Death Star sucking all energy into its depths. It is a safe.

  It transforms my life. Because it creates quietude in this house.

  Long ago, my eldest, then a toddler, began a whiny tantrum. He wouldn’t stop. I smacked him, which I’d never done before. He looked at me, bewildered, then burst into great howls of outrage. I rushed him into my arms and held him and held him, and wept, too: for what I’d done, and for the woman I’d become. I didn’t recognise her. Stress had driven me to a place I’d never been. It was a like a rampant weed affecting every facet of my life, even the most cherished.

  I’d never felt so depleted. As a freshly married wife with two small children I’d suddenly lost control of my world, the migraine-free existence of a single career girl who’d always called all the shots: what she ate, how much sleep she got, how much time she had to herself.

  I’d been disappearing into the strange new land of the homemaker where I often forgot to eat because I was so busy tending to the needs of everyone else, where I’d sometimes end up crying over the dishes in the sink for no other reason than I was exhausted. I was dealing with a new diminishing; a feeling that all the promise and vividness of my youth, all its loudness and spontaneity and joy, was being rubbed out.

  My safe is purely for one thing only. The objects that blight my existence. As a mother, I have turned into a woman I do not recognise, with a voice I do not like. The safe exists purely for screens.

  This mysterious steel box is my children’s distraction stealer. The jabbery-noise enveloper. My colluder in calm and quiet. The multiple screens have the ability to change the entire dynamic of our house and I cannot bear them, for what they do to my children and many kids around us. So now, for a large chunk of the weekends and nights, each child’s screen is locked away. A quiet invades our world, and it is as wondrous as a house under a flight path where all the planes have disappeared.

  The safe is my saviour because my four children were transported to Australia from England to be basted by fresh air and light, and that doesn’t mean the electronic kind. Plus, I’ve lost more than a few devices over the years as ever more ingenious hiding places have been devised then promptly forgotten—and oh, the disquiet of that. (Alice! Alice!) Plus, long ago various children overcame the abject terror of the scariest place in the house—Mum’s Underwear Drawer—to hold breaths and plunge and retrieve screens secreted away in it. Plus, I became sick of returning home from nights out to find a sloppy house; chairs nudging shelves and high cupboards ransacked; sick of hour-long battles over the blasted objects—because it felt too much like addiction. And I don’t want teenage bedrooms violated by that rectangular glow late into the night. Their brains and bodies are growing; they need to be enveloped by a thick, womb-like, nurturing dark.

  Kith is an old, quiet word, obsolete now. Yet it’s often used in that expression of solace and return, ‘kith and kin’. The word’s original meaning: your land and your people; that which is deeply known and familiar. Jay Griffiths in her book Kith has looked at the way our western world is estranging its children from nature, and from quiet. From the earthy world of their early years, from the kith that sings so naturally in their blood and bones. We’re evolving away from the natural world and Griffiths despairs of it.

  The house’s mood has been transformed by our safe. Its purchase was inspired by family holidays when a hotel room strong-box allowed us to quarantine screens from breakfast until evening. And we came together as a family, loosened, played and rediscovered each other. Bowed backs straightened, little faces opened to the world, tables hosted talk. Our family quietened. Wondrously. It felt soldering and strong.

  Four kids down the track I haven’t smacked a child in years, and I rarely shout; I’ve relaxed, let go. I’ve learnt that the threat of screens being locked in a safe, or a cancellation of the Netflix subscription, is a much more effective disciplinary tool. Discipline issues arise when you’re failing to connect. They often feel like a child’s extreme call for attention; the gift of noticing. Of listening. Of pausing. As a parent you need to reflect, take in, consider and communicate, and it’s taken me years to understand that.

  ‘My oldest childhood memories have the flavour of the earth,’ wrote Federico García Lorca, a Spanish poet and dramatist. Don’t we all have recollections of childhoods marinated in nature? Mine: tadpoles in jam jars; red-bellied black snakes in gutters; my brothers’ red-back spider farm in ice cream containers in the carport; peeling paperbarks off trees; the dry flick of grasshoppers through tall grass; the summer shrill of cicadas rising and falling and then dropping into a silence, as crisp as an orchestra. It was an expansive childhood of wonder and freedom, rambling and daydreaming.

  One night recently various kids held an unprompted, competitive piano jam. Composing and riffing, laughing and daring each other on. I sat secretly on the top step, revelling in the spontaneous creativity, cackling away like the old witch I was—the witch who’d spirited away all devices and introduced thick, non-electronic sleep into blighted lives; who’d deliberately sowed an old-fashioned boredom throughout the house. The chuff over this transforming, rescuing object feels as delicious as the mauve Malvern Star bicycle with plastic daisies on its spokes.

  Writer Barry Lopez explains that the enervating joy of the natural world, discovered at a young age, can be a lifelong solace—and a fierce peace can be derived from this knowledge. Meandering days quietly basking in nature teach us autonomy and courage, risk-taking and self-rule—and respect for the beauty of the world around us. We learn those lessons in childhood, and carry them through life.

  A theme of Jay Griffiths’ writing is enclosure, the horror of it. Our children’s worlds—with all the stresses of study and exams and the crowding of extracurricular activities—are becoming relentlessly interior. Time is fenced off, boxed in; heads are bowed to screens; everything is compartmentalised. There is little sprawl. Griffiths argues that the way we’re raising the current generation is deeply unnatural and children are becoming more fearful, depressed and dependent because of it; that unrecognised damage is being caused. She says the human spirit needs to feel quietly rooted, somewhere on earth, within the vivid green of our world.

  It was obscene. Ridiculous. Wrong, wrong, wrong on every level. But oh, so right. I can barely bring myself to type the bare bones of this. My husband banished me entirely from the family equation. Disappeared me. Insisted, for all their sake. Sent me far, far away, beginning from that day of near-universal female collapse—Boxing Day.

  How on earth could they survive without me? I flatter myself. They had a ball. The husband had planned this most particular dad-bliss for the one time of the year when work quietened for him; and he knew that they all needed a break from scary Good Cop, the House Disciplinarian. And I needed a break from myself. To be purged of the snapping and shouting; to become less cruel; and to sleep. In quietness.

  We’re fortunate in Australia because we can baste our children in nature without much effort—if we choose to. Awaken them to the wonder of the world around them, instil in them a soldering sense of kith. My daughter’s preschool teacher described her as ‘a true child of nature,’ brimming with joy when she’s getting mucky in the bush, climbing trees, cupping insects.

  As a parent I have to honour that. Remind myself not to shut off the wonder of a fat butter moon and the roar of a sunset before nightfall bleeds in; to point out the oddness of a banksia and the beauty of a cicada shell. To pause, with her. Absorb quietly together the natural beauty we all take for granted. Because in adulthood she may well spiral back to it, and find a great solace in it.

  The bliss of a temporary bed to myself. Mornings not rudely crashed into by a 5-year-old addicted to dawn. Going to the toilet without an audience—even the dog, most disconcertingly, has got in on that act. Bedtimes by 9 pm. A nit-free existen
ce. Cereal and or chocolate for lunch and dinner, too, if I want. Entire days without hearing ‘Mum, Mum, Mum,’ on wearying repeat.

  It was one big Get Lost because the husband knew I’d come back stronger and calmer. It was creative oblivion and erasure and euphoria all in one and it felt urgent and necessary amid the drowning. And I highly recommend these restorative bouts, as essential therapy, for any mother screaming inside to find the woman she once was.

  V

  I hate the very noise of troublous man Who did and does me all the harm he can.

  John Clare

  Shyness is the enemy and the bully. It ambushes me, the blush vining through my face; hot and impossible to halt. The reddened flush is a window to a mortified soul. It’s the raw me, exposed; awkwardness laid bare. Hello to the frenemy that’s been with me my entire life, that pulls me away from parties early; has me shrinking into silence at dinner tables where only the preoccupied host is known; has me mortified at the length of a charity debate I’ve foolishly agreed to do; has me dreading the school function where I have to walk in, alone. Shyness is the quietness that the wider world doesn’t accept.

  The power of the pause. That thinking silence between the slap in the face and the reaction. That moment between listening and talking. That rescuing stopping before countering, in heat.

  Social and cultural historian Joe Moran says he’s well qualified to write a book on the topic—called Shrinking Violets, no less—because he’s felt shy for as long as he can remember. He worries that some countries are beginning to medically treat this deeply human vulnerability. Shyness, in some places, is now being diagnosed as a psychiatric disorder. Yet psychologists are pushing back, believing it’s a move to ‘correct’ anything that falls outside the norm.