Mother Noise by Cindy House

Author:Cindy House
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner / Marysue Rucci Books
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

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When I found myself feeling helpless as a mother more than twenty years later, when Atlas seemed to be falling apart as a response to my divorce, his father’s immediate remarriage to someone who I thought treated him poorly, and the complicated coparenting relationship that resulted, I thought about new books for Atlas.

One specific day in Atlas’s first year of school stands out when I think about his suffering. He was attending a co-op that one of the parents liked to call “the little hippie school.” There were only eight kids, and we parents pooled our money to rent the space where school was held and to pay the wonderful teacher who spent those days with our children. Things had been getting worse and worse for Atlas; he was more and more out of control, crying, screaming, accusing the other kids of leaving him out or picking on him. It was winter, and after school the kids would all play in the yard for a while as the parents stood around chatting. I didn’t see what sparked it, but Atlas was suddenly screaming at the other kids, who mostly stared at him openmouthed, or turned their backs on his noise to continue the game they were playing. I went to him and tried to get him to talk to me, tried to get him to walk away so he could calm down. He wouldn’t budge. I myself was frozen, ineffective and scared—and embarrassed, if I’m honest. Everyone could see that I could not reach my own child.

I abruptly went down in front of my screaming son, knees in the snow, and put my hands up.

“Show me how angry you are,” I said, looking into his face. “Push against my hands as hard as you can and show me how angry you are.”

My knees were already becoming numb inside my soaking-wet jeans. My son leaned into my hands, pushing with all his weight and grunting and growling with rage. It felt like a victory just to have him follow my directions.

“I see you,” I said. “I see how angry you are. My, you are so angry right now.”

His rage dissipated and melted into sobs. Heartbreaking, gut-wrenching sobs. I felt humbled, drained, shocked, terrified. Maybe he would never be okay, I thought.

I had begun to read chapter books to Atlas like The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Charlotte’s Web, and Frog and Toad, but he needed stories that could be true, real characters he could relate to, fictional kids who had struggles as big as or bigger than his own. He understood that his friends at school weren’t acting the way he was, but it’s hard to explain to a five-year-old that his friends weren’t living the same trauma.

I took him home on a weepy afternoon that winter, and we got in bed, and I cracked open the book Wonder by R. J. Palacio, a novel about a boy who was born with a severe facial deformity and has to navigate

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