Silently Screaming

Silently Screaming Part 1

By Aleta Sowards



Noise screeches through my ears with people honking their horns in traffic because they just want to get home. Not only are they stuck in massive traffic, but the county has decided now will be just fine to handle the construction project they are behind on. A deadline that should have been met a year ago but they couldn't do their part, because they were waiting on approval from someone above them who is still waiting on funding, etc; and while we're waiting in traffic screaming internally, the gas dissipates. Now if we actually get to the gas station in time we have to use this month's mortgage money to fill up the car, which leads to spending what if any savings we have or our children's' tuition money to pay the mortgage for one more month so we can hopefully re finance while the market is low.

All we want to do is get to our house and just plop down and think not of any responsibilities, but there are even more responsibilities when we get there. It wasn't enough that we had a customer go off on us today, an employee not show up on time, our boss breathing down our neck over something that wasn't even our assigned job, if we did have lunch the server took too long, because she/he was most likely dealing with an unruly customer as we did earlier, but now we have no time to eat. We get back to work with the promise that our time here is almost over and we can go home and plop down, but that's when some new crisis arises and we find ourselves working late. Finally we are ready to leave and there is a flat tire or the car battery is dead so we deal with that. What we couldn't wait to turn sixteen for is now our dreaded obligation so we proceed onto the ramp that leads us home but not without going through hell to get there.

Eventually, most days, we do make it home. Then the real work begins. There will be no plopping down, there will be responsibilities, many unexpected ones most likely to top it all off. Food has to be prepared,  for those of us with kids homework has to be checked there is some type of activity soccer, baseball, etc, maybe more than one, I'll stop here on kids because if you have them I need not go into anymore detail and if you don't I may scare you from ever having any. Unfortunately, we still aren't plopping on the nice furniture we are still paying for every month.  For most of us work continues to call us or email us – why did I get this stupid blackberry? While this is going on realization hits we have to prepare for going to work the next day, because most of us are hitting the snooze even though we vow to never do that again; so we get the clothes ready, prepare the coffee or tea whatever gets us partly awake in our mornings, if we are a wife, we are most likely making preparations for our spouse as well. Whom by the way is either still working or has been in the house as long as we have but we haven't spoken other than a nod here as we pass each other talking to our employers/employees and we occasionally may pass by and nod, maybe even smile while one of us walks by with a pile of laundry and the other is looking over the bill for the flat tire we had to repair earlier. If we eat together at all (and that is a miracle in itself) more noise is coming from the TV, a radio, or the chomping of our teeth as we eat because we can't spend too much time here we only have 10-12 hours max before we are back at work again. All this noise yet we really sit in silence when it comes to what we should be discussing. Those important issues which rattled in our brains all day to not forget to go over when we reached home and each other, but by now we have forgotten that we have to pay one of the many credit card bills and if we don't pay it ONLINE TOMORROW we will have a late fee and possibly an over the limit fee. Yet we do forget until it's charged to us and to save our credit so we can re finance this house which we never enjoy we tap into the savings or trust fund or we sell something we swore we'd never get rid of. Eventually we do manage to make it to bed after dishes and more phone calls and putting our young children back in bed AGAIN then we hear our teenagers with their routine speech on how we don't understand, they hate us, their friends are allowed to go, all the while giving us the my parents are idiots stare - doors slam and we retreat because the same discussion will be back tomorrow. Ok, we're heading to bed again, now we need a shower but the hot water is pretty much gone because everyone else in our house including the dishes in the dishwasher are clean. If we do manage at best a luke warm shower we make the horrible mistake of glancing in the mirror- now we notice another wrinkle and go through another half hour of working on that and questioning whether botox would be easier and cheaper in the long run, not to mention the cellulite, or love handles that weren't there yesterday, so we ponder if we can get the botox free while getting lypo and laser surgery for those stretch marks; by now we've noticed our roots our coming out. This causes  another financial issue and don't forget reminder to make an appointment with our stylist asap, by the time we get to brushing our teeth and realize we really have to go to the dentist we are having a panic attack because now we need a hair stylist a plastic surgeon a dental appointment and a dr. appointment for sedatives and since we don't have time to do any of these things it doesn't really matter that we're too far in debt to do them. By now we are either smoking a cigarette/having a large drink or at the very least at least pondering why did I give up my bad habits- life is killing me faster than they ever could. So we finally shrug our shoulders and head to bed when here comes the family pet, we take care of Kat or Fido or the missing gerbil or whatever reptiles we purposely allowed in our home and our youngest child is up again, this time he's thirsty, hungry, and anything else that will allow him to stay up a little longer. So we deal with that; work calls again with some stupid mundane issue that can wait nine hours so we ignore this last call we just don't care at his point - and………..FINALLY we arrive in our bedroom; though we didn't get to plop on our new living room furniture we can plop here besides by this point the floor is looking like a heavenly place to just drop dead. No time to read or watch TV or really talk with our spouse –you know like they always seem to do in movies-- we check the alarm and instruct our selves we have to go to sleep now or we'll never get up. So we do the routinely goodnight kiss turn everything off and prepare for hibernation. Guess what we're still up, we're lying there listening to our husband snore and going over tomorrow's events already. We order our brain to shut up but it gets louder as does the snorer next to us, we think of how we should have spoke more at dinner and played with the kids and vow we're going to make more time for all of these things.. When we do drift off into our correct restful part of REM sleep, the alarm goes off and we hit snooze.

And it starts all over again…..



Aleta Sowards

copyright Oct./2007