Today in the soothing quiet of the Rec Center pool, an insight bubbled up regarding a life-long pattern. I have always loved silence.
I am maybe 4, the youngest of 6 at our noisy dinner table. My parents ask questions of each child to find out about our day. This is effortless for the older ones—Becky 6, Dave 9, Mike and Margy 11, and Steve 13. I watch, waiting to be invited in. My mother can tell I have something to say, and calls on me, bidding the others’ attention. “Rachie has something to tell us..” Even with one or two follow up questions, the polite silence does not feel like attention but interruption. Inevitably, whatever I had to say that day was met with a perfunctory 30 seconds of silence before their conversations resumed. Looking back on it now, I felt like I was the commercial spot in their much more interesting “regularly scheduled programming.”
In another memory at 5 or 6: It is spring or early summer. I have dressed myself and stolen outside in the early morning to the swing set in our yard behind the manse, a dewy field of young corn is behind me, the red brick church building my father preaches in is to my left in front of me. I drink in the welcoming silence of the new day. I watch the bats wheeling across the blue, back to the white steeple bell tower; I hear the proverbial early bird, a robin, rifle the ground and pull out a nightcrawler. I witness the small globes of dew hanging like pearls on a spider web. There is much chaos in the house by mid-morning, but at this hour outside I see and feel enfolded in created order. There is room for my voice here. I can speak my thoughts out loud, or remain one with the stillness.
In this memory, I am 30. I am a young mom now, sitting in my favorite recliner by the window in the living room. I am here with my journal and my Bible, stealing a few moments alone with my thoughts in the early morning before my precious little daughter, 3, and my son, 1 storm the living room and hijack my day. My mother has recently taken her life after years of living with the excruciating pain of schizophrenia. I pour out my pain in rushed cursive into my journal. My sweet little daughter appears in the doorway. Not a storm at all, but a gentle morning breeze. I welcome her into my silence and we sit awhile, as her mind wakes up and I have the privilege of listening to her thoughts before her brother wakes up and we are on with our day.
This last memory feels like a nightmare now. I am 58. I have stayed too long in a job that doesn’t love me. I am a Special Ed Inclusion teacher, and I have only ever wanted to do what my official title is—to be a co-teacher. In this room, I have been told to sit in the back and BE QUIET. I have been told by the General Ed teacher that my rotating through the classroom during the work period to engage with all students and question them to go deeper is “needling“ them. After the opening lecture, I am ushered across the hall with “my” students with Individualized Education Plans. These students were placed in “co-teaching” General education classes, but my colleague sends us away to be more like a Resource class. I pour into them, the injustice hanging in the air like smoke. Most of them make the best grades in the class, but we are “smelling the smoke”—the injustice. I feel powerless to put out the fire. When I finally tell my colleague he is breaking the law, he gives full vent to his irrational ire. Nothing changes, but my failing health.
Today, at 64, after a year of retirement, I realize why I got so auditorily exhausted by the end of a “teaching” day. I was required to pay attention to all the noise around me while being banished to silence who I really am. I was a piece of furniture, a complication in the General Education teacher’s day, I was a glorified aide whose judgments even on who to allow to go to the bathroom were second guessed. In short, I was relegated to be treated like the youngest at the table without a voice.
Now I can bathe in healing silence. I can choose to be with people in structured ways, and I do, or have a tête-à-tête with a friend. I can create characters on the pages of a fledgling novel, or jot poems and reflections in my journal with no interruptions. I can walk the hilly paths of a nearby cemetery in the cool of a morning and remember and re-experience the magic of mattering to God.
Rachel Landrum Crumble poet 