Selective hearing

I never noticed how many corners and crevices our house has, and how the sound doesn’t seem to reach around any of them with clear or even audible volume. I had just assumed the selective hearing of my children fueled the war between standing at attention for parental requests or relaxing into the at-ease slump as they tune in to the ambient electronic life: air-conditioners chugging, overhead fans swirling, and earbuds in full bloom. 

It’s hard to hear a parent calling up the stairs during a power outage in your ice-cold lair of a room, but amid a 21st-century wall of sound, it’s impossible.

A mother still tied to the 20th century opens her maw and screeches. 

I just stand at the bottom of the stairs and yell her name over and over until her brother - tired of my increasing vocal fry - knocks on her closed door to relay the message. “Mom wants you.” 

She lollygags. Mom is safe. “Mom has the patience of a saint,” she’s heard her grandmother say ... though she, having never been to church herself, doesn’t fully grasp all the ins and outs of beatification. 

Her father, on the other hand, will see this lack of sound transfer as willful disregard, and he will respond with the booming voice of a drill sergeant. 

Out of desperation and a disinclination to climb stairs one more time, I join the new millennium and text her: It’s dinner time.

And she texts back:  🍩😆.

Without an actual word her door opens and she clamors into the kitchen, plate at the ready. Voices trailing her in cyberspace.

This is how it is now. 

How often had I joked that I’m waiting in rapt anticipation for the Internet to break? Salivating for the moment when torment and ruination bring us back to basics.

Face to face. 

The grandparents would complain about “kids today,” but they can’t without a small measure of hypocrisy. They get just as sucked into games of smartphone solitaire.

But honestly, I don’t want to go backward. I like being able to change plans in real time. I love being able to make our impolite conversations quieter. 

After all, it has been a while since I lost my voice screaming into the voids of the house since the advent of Snapchat. And my daughter can “talk” to me without the usual barriers of time and space; and without having to interpret the look on my furrowed brow.

A part of me misses the nights I’d sit at the end of her bed, and we would chat, or brush hair or read bedtime stories. 

These days I poke my head in, and she waves goodnight. She’s in the middle of some teenage ritual, be it homework, or makeup or something I just wouldn’t understand. 

I close the door and retreat. Attending to my own nighttime routine: brush teeth, skin cream, read a chapter or two ... think about the morning when we’ll cross paths in the kitchen.

I will take a moment to lament laughter replaced with LOL.

Until my phone chimes like a spoon against a wine glass; she has sent me little face with tears.

My daughter, wanting a different kind of heart-to-heart, one with cartoon hearts and Internet shorthand that I will have to decode.

I do my best to find animal videos that seem apropos.

When she’s feeling better, possibly after the fourth cat meme I forward, I will start to correct her spelling and grammar.

And my phone will stop clinking its glass.

Perhaps I’ve found a corner of the internet where our teens can no longer hear us.