Getting Loud

The first few months after my divorce, I noticed Lilly was approaching life as an observer.  In a crowd, she stood back and watched until she was coaxed to join. What was heartbreaking was watching her response to loud voices.  She winced, making me wonder how many times she had heard a sharp, angry voice directed at her.  I couldn’t bear to see her flinch at loud voices, whether in anger or laughter.  Almost four years old, she should have been squealing in laughter, yowling in tears, acting like a normal child and not like a ghost. 

I thought of a new game.  I would demonstrate to Lilly that loud voices, screaming, and yelling could be good voices.  The first night I tried it, my child looked at me as though I had gone insane.

We stepped inside the house after our day was done.  I put down my purse and announced loudly: “It’s time to beat my child!”

Lilly stared up at me in confusion, her big brown eyes huge.

“You'd better start running, or I’m gonna get you!”

Lilly realized it was a game and scrambled away from me.  She ran through the living room and into my bedroom.  Our house was circular, with the living room, bedroom, bathroom, hallway, kitchen, and back to the living room. I ran after her, screaming at the top of my voice.

“I’m gonna get you, and then I am gonna beat my child!”

Lilly started squealing in excitement as we ran from room to room.  I turned around and met her halfway into the hallway.  She screamed when she ran up to me, scrambling to turn around and run in the other direction. We ran and yelled and screamed as loud as we could.

“No, mama!  “You don’t beat me!”  Lilly yelled as she ran.

She was yelling!  She was being loud!  She was laughing out loud. The game ended when we were exhausted, and Lilly stood still.  I grabbed her and tossed her on the bed, lying down next to her.  Laughing and giggling, I explained the rules of the game to Lilly.

“It’s okay to yell.  It doesn’t mean you are gonna be in trouble or that anyone is going to get hurt.  It's okay to be loud.  The worst thing that can happen is someone tells you to be quiet, right?  Do you think Michael’s mom thinks I am really beating you, or does she know we were laughing and playing a game?”

“We are just being silly, Mama.”

We played that game for years.  At first, we played it several times a week, until my just saying, “I think it’s time to…” would send her into giggles and running. 

It didn’t cure Lilly of her empathy when she saw a child being yelled at by their parents.  But she learned there was no need to fear loud voices or to hold her joy inside. With only the two of us now, we didn’t have the loud noises of a household full of family; we had to create our own chaos.

When I was Lilly’s age, there had always been noise.  Dad might be swearing and trying to see if the chainsaw started, without leaving the comfort of his rocking chair. Mom would be in the kitchen singing old gospel songs. The barking of dogs, the bawling of cattle, and the bickering of Donna and Tubby were background noise in my life.   Thick accents and loud laughter from the company sitting around the kitchen table were a daily occurrence. All the old farmers were half deaf from working on machinery, and their wives spoke louder to be heard.

From the cloud of cigarette smoke, a random adult would occasionally yell,

“You damn kids go out and play if you are gonna be so noisy.  What are you doing in the house anyway? Get outside.”

“If youse keep running around crazy like that, one of you is gonna be crying soon.”

“Now what the hell have you got into?”

My cousins and I generally ignored the adults' bellows. We were the generation when any adult felt empowered to yell at anyone’s child.  If Cousin Virgie yelled at her kids, the rest of us were included.  The adult conversation never halted.  Sip coffee, drag off a cigarette, yell at the loud kids, and continue the discussion of the moment.

Loud was the status quo; it was safe and comfortable.  My parents didn’t argue in front of us, but they didn’t hesitate to make loud comments.  Individually, the three of us were frequently the recipients of a “good talking to” that involved threats of bodily harm in loud voices. 

Tubby always got his revenge on the rare occasions when Mom turned her anger on him. As expected, he would stand there and endure his shouted lecture. There was no option to debate or discuss. That never occurred to us. Instinctively, we knew that any interruption of a loud rant would lead to a longer, louder lecture with additional threats and punishments. After agreeing to his dictated punishment for his offenses, Tubby would walk away from his lecture and wink at me. Then, in a low voice, he would start singing.

“Puff the magic dragon lives by the sea.”

I was always amazed at his bravery.  I was sure that if Mom ever heard him, she would have slapped his face off his skull. Mom was tiny, but to her credit, she put all of her weight behind her voice.

Dad supposedly was hard of hearing.  I say supposedly because he could hear me whisper a devious plan of misbehavior from behind closed doors on the other side of the house.  But when Mom complained or went into one of her bitching rants, he sat nonplussed, sipping coffee and watching the TV.  When Mom finally ran out of breath and anger, Dad would look up at her.

“Huh?” He would ask.

By that time, whatever Mom was angry about was no longer a pressing issue, and she didn’t have the energy to repeat it. This meant that over time, Mom would get louder, and Dad would get deafer. This half-shouted vocal tone became her speaking voice, and heaven helped the child who tried to shush her in public.

Pretending not to hear Mom would only encourage her to repeat her outrageous statements even louder.  I hated going to funerals with mom for that very reason. The scenario was always the same.

“Look at all these old farts.  When the hell did everyone get old?”

That would be announced as soon as we stepped into the church. Then would be the dreaded walk up to look at the deceased lying in state before the altar.

“Oh, look at that.  They got so much paint on him, he looks like a three-dollar whore on a Saturday night.”

Or, more rarely, the appreciative comment.

“Look at that.  She looks better now than she ever looked alive.”

Usually, though, it was a criticism.  There was always something just a little bit off.

“Why did they put her glasses on her if she is supposed to look like she is sleeping? She never had her hair like that. Why did they do that to her?  They couldn’t have given them (the funeral home director) a picture or something?”

“They look dead.”  It was the ultimate dismissal of the talents of the mortician. At that statement, I would try to get Mom to move along before she thought of something else to say.

“Maybe because they are dead, Mom?”

There was one comment that always got to me, and risked the chance of me breaking into giggles, “They put him in a suit? He wouldn’t be caught dead in a suit.”

Once I managed to move Mom along with gentle nudges and hip shoves, Mom would continue from the pew.  Regardless of whether the funeral was for someone from her family, Dad’s family, or a friend, Mom would have something to say about the arrangements or the mourners.

“Wonder if Pete is going to show up?”

“Who is Pete?”

“Your father’s third cousin on his Ma’s side.  Laziest son of a bitch I ever met.  Put his food stamps under his work shoes, and he’d starve to death.  He’s gonna show up; they are having lunch after this in the basement. Fat bastard never misses a meal.  Yup, there he is now.”

Inevitably, Mom would nod toward an elderly man, usually with a cane or crutches.  Old and unsteady on his feet, his shriveled, worn-out body supported by one or two other relatives as he shuffled to view the body. 

Trying to appear solemn and appropriate, I had to hold a Kleenex up to my face.  At one funeral, the minister spoke eloquently about the deceased finding the Lord and being at peace, knowing he would find life ever after.

Mom’s whisper, which was two decibels above anyone’s normal speaking voice, cut through the minister’s sermon.

“He told me he didn’t believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and some white man in a bedsheet sitting on a cloud either.” 

I shrank as much as I could into the pew.  My only hope was that the mourners didn’t recognize Mom and thought she was some mentally unstable lady, and I was her paid attendant from the asylum.  I patted her shoulder in what I hoped looked like a move that a paid attendant, completely unrelated to this lady, would do.

At the funeral of a distant relative on Mom’s side, I rose with Mom as the casket was escorted from the church.  As the pallbearers marched behind the casket, Mom announced, “Well, that’s that, she was the only one I could stand out of the.”

I don’t flinch at loud voices or angry voices.  Mom wore me out until I no longer could flinch.  Instead, I learned to look at the ridiculousness of the situation.  Loud and bickering was our family's love language.

Dad could get loud as well.  Chasing animals back into a fence brought out the loud and ridiculous insults.  Dad’s angry shouting was so overblown that it became comical.  

“What the hell is wrong with you?  Are you blind?  Are you crippled? Do you have the rheumatism?”

The humor in the questions was easy to find later.  We were trying to outrun a four-legged farm animal running at full speed across a field while wearing worn-out shoes.  During that time, we were bombarded with questions from Dad, who was standing somewhere near the starting line.  The game was deciding whether the questions were rhetorical or required an answer.

Do we stop and yell back across six acres of frozen plowed field? What would we say? I imagined answering him, standing there, hands on my hips in mockery.

“No, Dad, I am not blind.”  “No, Father, I was not crippled before I started chasing this pig.”  “No, beloved patriarch, I have not yet been diagnosed with the rheumatism.”

Dad never moved; his job was to stand back, hands on his hips, and yell aggressive encouragement.  Mom was not included in this family adventure.  If she had helped to chase, there was never a word directed towards her.  Dad would get so frustrated that he was senseless, but he was never stupid.

In public, Dad never yelled.  I only know of three instances in 34 years of life and stories in which Dad yelled at someone.  Once, a cattle dealer tried to cheat him on a deal with cows; once, when he and his brother got into an argument about lumber; and once, when I pulled the tractor apart.  In that situation, after he screamed at me, he called the man who previously owned the tractor and accused him of selling a murder machine.

On the rare occasion that Dad dusted off his wedding/funeral suit and went to a funeral, he was quiet as a mouse.   He didn’t dare shush Mom; he kept his head down and acted solemn.  I clung to Dad in public, a nonverbal declaration: “The comments made by that woman over there are not necessarily representative of the entire family.”

We draw on what we know.  We learn parenting, good or bad, by what we observed and experienced with our own parents.  I knew that there was a lot of Lilly’s Grandma Pearl in me.  But I was also half of my father.  I could blow my cool and talk stupidly if I let myself go wild in anger.

My mom’s father had an explosive and violent anger, and her mother was, for lack of other words, crazy.  As a young wife, my mother spent a lot of time with her mother-in-law, learning parenting skills and navigating the large Baumgart clan.    

Dad’s father was a drunk with a temper.  His mother was a gentle woman, a devout Christian, and a calm woman with a wicked tongue when provoked.  Dad’s anger was loud and made about as much sense as a drunk’s rambling.  But his anger wasn’t common, and his loudness was usually laughter.

I had learned, slowly and with difficulty, that I could choose and use my experiences in life to learn and grow.  I chose to mix it up, throw the generational trauma in the air, and see where I would land.  I had my mom’s irony and sarcasm, my father’s love and gentleness, my mother’s pain and worry, and my father’s ridiculous loudness. I was a little bit crazy like my grandmother, a bit of a wicked tongue, sometimes explosive and impulsive like my grandfather.  Too often in my life, I hurt myself with my anger and bitterness.

I had learned how to be a parent from my parents and the community surrounding me.  But it was my choice how to use that information.  Sometimes, unbidden, my mother’s voice came through to haunt me.

“I guess if I want to keep a pair of nail clippers around this house, I will have to pack them up my ass!”

As the words escaped my mouth, I started to laugh.  Mom could haunt me, even possess my brain for a minute, but she was easily defused with laughter.

Part of the reason Lilly was uncomfortable with loud or angry voices was that it was foreign to her. I didn’t make sharp cutting remarks in a loud voice, or bellow insults in frustration. Our house was deliberately kept as a haven with gentle voices. I intended to erase any angry words or indication that she was an annoyance.

That’s the story of how I found myself at forty-four years old, chasing a preschooler in circles through my house.  Screaming, “It's time to beat my child,” and growling like a bear.  That’s the story of how you stop generational trauma and use your history as a steppingstone, not a brick wall.