Finding Your Voice

I have no voice.

Like I literally have no voice.

This happens to me about once a year, sometimes twice, usually in tandem with a bad cold, and for a few days I’m left sounding like cross between Bonnie Raitt and a seal.

It’s just as awful as it sounds. (The seal part, not Bonnie Raitt. When it’s just Bonnie Raitt I get asked to create peoples’ voice mail messages for them).

Losing your voice is pretty inconvenient for anyone, but wrangling four kids on semi-permanent silent mode? Well, that’s just downright cruel.

At least I thought it was until I realized that there’s really nothing I can do, and when you realize that you can only gesture, write things (haha, that’s hilarious, especially with two kids who can’t read), or what I’m doing, speak very minimally and quietly (though not whispering, promise), well, you find your life becomes a whole lot calmer, not to mention, quieter.

I can have my yelling moments, like any parent I suppose, so being forced to walk to your kids to speak with them, or requiring them to come to you — with a whistle or a snap — has been, well, eye-opening. As you might guess, having to do this has slowed me down significantly. There’s no yelling for someone upstairs, while running down the stairs to tend to someone else because no one can hear me. It’s been a lot of one-on-one conversations, a lot of face-to-face interactions, and well, I really like it.

Of course on the flip side, I’m really hard to understand on a work call, which is only made worse when it’s a conference call with ten people. I loathe those anyway so to not be able to do anything but squawk, and then have to repeat myself because only about three people could hear me at such a low decibel gets pretty frustrating.

And I have a completely silent laugh that almost hurts when it happens. Without laughter and the joking and the singing at the top of my lungs, I’m just, well, not myself.

These blips of time when I’m rendered silent don’t last very long. And I try not to be the one to read into every situation, every happening like it’s completely full of life meaning. Sometimes you just lose your phone for the entire day or you burn your finger or you just lose your voice because you have a cold-slash-allergies-slash-tax-week.

But I’m also one to take notice when stuff like this happens, at what’s going on around me, in my life, in the life of my kids, and I do take a step back to ponder and meditate, not because I believe that something needs to be resolved, per se’, in order for me to get my voice back. But considering how I tend to see physical symptoms of what’s going on with me emotionally, it’s probably a smart move to slow down and figure out what all this quiet really means in my life right now.