Chronicles of My Childhood: The Crime of Silence

There was a time in my childhood when I genuinely believed that silence was a punishable offence.

Not officially, of course. There was no law written on the walls of our house declaring that children must make noise at all times. But somehow, we knew.

Silence was suspicious.

If we were all in the room and nobody was talking, somehow, Mummy would notice.

And then came the call.

“John!”

Just my name.

Nothing else.

You know that kind of call.

The kind that makes you immediately begin an audit of your last thirty minutes.

What did I do?

What did I break?

Who did I offend?

Why am I being summoned?

Sometimes, we had done absolutely nothing.

We had simply decided to be quiet.

In fact, our silence was often an act of love. Mummy was tired. She had been working, cooking, cleaning, doing the thousand things mothers somehow manage to do without ever receiving an invoice for their labour.

So we thought we were helping.

Let us just be quiet.

Let Mummy rest.

But Mummy did not always see it that way.

“Why are you people so quiet?”

And there it was.

The question.

The interrogation of silence.

We would look at one another, genuinely confused.

But what exactly do you want us to do?

We were not fighting.

We were not breaking anything.

We were not disturbing anybody.

We were simply quiet.

Yet, somehow, our silence had become evidence.

Looking back now, I wonder whether mothers overthink these things.

Perhaps silence was not silence to her.

Perhaps it was a signal.

Perhaps she had learnt, through experience, that when children suddenly become quiet, something is usually happening.

Maybe somewhere in her mind, quiet children were children plotting.

And perhaps that is the funny thing about growing up.

We spend so much of our lives assuming that other people see what we see.

They do not.

The same room can hold different realities for different people.

What one person sees as peace, another may see as withdrawal.

What one person considers consideration, another may interpret as indifference.

What one person calls honesty, another may experience as cruelty.

What one person believes is love may not even look like love from the other side of the mirror.

And sometimes, neither person is wrong.

They are simply standing in different places.

Mirrors are funny things.

They reflect what is placed before them, but the reflection changes depending on where you stand.

Perhaps people are not so different.

We look at one another from the positions life has given us, through experiences the other person may know nothing about, and then wonder why the reflection does not look the same.

As children, we thought Mummy was criminalising silence.

Today, I understand that perhaps she was simply reading the silence through her own experience.

And perhaps that is one of the quieter lessons of growing up:

Not everything another person sees is something we intended to show them.

Sometimes, we are simply wearing different caps.

And unless we pause long enough to move from where we are standing, we may never understand why the same thing looks so different to them.

So yes, Mummy...

We were quiet because we wanted you to rest.

We were not plotting anything.

We were not hiding anything.

We were not guilty.

We were just children trying, in our own little way, to give our mother some peace.

Although, to be fair, after that third “John!” from the other room, we learnt one important lesson.

Sometimes, peace requires making just enough noise to prove that nobody is doing anything wrong.