The Soundtrack to Family Life

Lockdown is making me sentimental. In between the tears brought on by seeing a note of thanks stuck to a bin, or an interview with the glorious Captain Tom, I’m trying to hold on to glimmers of light in these dark times. I’m like a cat chasing the beam from a torch on a shadowy wall.

Gratitude is a survival strategy. I’m incredibly lucky to be in lockdown with John and the girls. None of them know how to dispose of the inside of a toilet roll, but they make me laugh more than shout, and that’s a precious thing.
Since being holed up, I’ve started to notice much more about my surroundings, particularly the hubbub which is the soundtrack to our family life. To illustrate what I mean, I’ve chosen the strange noises I associate with individuals in my tribe:

Isla. This kid jumps everywhere, especially from the top three steps onto the landing. Ever since she was allowed to tackle the stairs alone, she’s thudded onto that small landing then clattered down the rest of the steps. We used to call her Tigger and her bouncing is a noisy expression of her zest for life, which I hope never levels out.

Like me, Isla is unlikely to be found with her mouth closed. If she’s not singing, she’s humming. If she’s not humming, she’s chattering. I would say chatting, but that implies conversation, and Isla doesn’t need a co-conversationalist. She’s got the talking covered on her own. A radio DJ formed from the womb.

John: He’s an entrepreneur, which is a fancy word for throwing everything you’ve got at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. By everything I mean time, resources, money, ingenuity, hopes, dreams and talent. The wall seems to be made of slippery glass, and the chances of anything sticking are remote, but when he gains purchase, he adds more work and focus and builds it into something very impressive. He does most of this from an office in our back garden, so his first sound is the keys rattling in the back door to let us know Daddy’s Home!

The next sound is his fingers strumming the strings of a bass guitar. He was playing bass on stage when I first saw him and the deep, solar-plexus thump of the bass has been the background music to our marriage. We’re a guitar-based-indie kind of couple. Don’t hold it against us.

Eva: It’s difficult to quantify the sounds of a teen. The tinny beats from the habitual headphones? The hairdryer that seems to be on for four hours after she’s had a bath? I think the most noticeable thing is the silence; the muting of the content she’s watching as soon as I walk into a room. The quiet from her bedroom in the morning as she lays in her bed, languid as a model in a Renaissance painting.

Generally monosyllabic, she grunts in reply to most enquiries until that magic moment when she decides to engage. Those moments are addictive; when her face smashes into a smile I recognise from when she used to wrap her pudgy baby arms around my neck, and she lets me in by disclosing a snippet from her secret inner world. When she looks directly into my eyes, I can see the sublime butterfly which will emerge from the chrysalis of the teenage years (It’s difficult to type when your fingers are crossed, BTW).

Me: I asked the others what my signature sound was and, without missing a beat, John said, ‘The relentless commentary on exactly what’s happening inside your head.’ I think he meant my sparkling repartee.

There are other sounds too like the clicking on of the kettle, the endless whirr of the dishwasher, but it’s the sounds of my family that make me feel lucky in these bonkers times; until one of them burps at the table, then it’s back to yelling as usual.