Hearing Voices in my Head

For some reason now that I've hit 44 I am up at butt crack dawn early, whether I'm working or not. This is both good and bad. The bad part is that I'm a hot mess at 9 pm on the couch and fighting to stay awake. The very good part is that nobody is up and I'm alone with some thoughts and if I'm lucky, even some paper quite early.

The part nobody tells you about having teens is that they have the attention span of gnats. When they want to ask you a question, they dart into your air space, yap a little bit and if you aren't giving them your attention, they huff off to pout. Since you don't know if they want you to explain how possibly our government lost 1,500 immigrant kids or are complaining about the peanut butter you bought, once has to listen to everything. They only emerge from their rooms on special occasions, but it really doesn't matter if you are on the step stool with your neck cranked sideways and painting a ceiling.

The one thing both of mine agree on is that it's way cool Mom can hear voices in her head. After I spent five days in Hawaii in early spring for my 20th anniversary, THE MAN declared that either I was choosing to ignore him or I had hearing loss. Thankfully it was something I could easily change. Doc said that my hearing loss wasn't from listening to Def Leppard and Pour Some Sugar on Me real loud on the bus with my Walkman when I was 17 but was hereditary. Sorry Mom. We're blaming the genes here.

To be honest, I didn't take it well the first five minutes. In fact, when I walked out to the parking lot I had a big moment of panic and thought, well that's that. I'm broken. As I drove over to the office, I remembered I work with a lot of bunch of guys who have hearing aids. One of our families that we are building a Habitat house for also both wear hearing aids and we work with them using an interpreter to make sure we're all communicating. Comparatively? I needed to quit the pity party and get over it.

Then I discovered I could crank the tunes on my phone and nobody else could hear them. So freaking cool. It's not like I normally have the good stuff. I mean, my mouse even has a cord and is one someone gave up for a fancy cordless gaming one. It's not all roses though. Luke did not enjoy me singing & using the paint roller as a mic the other day. He said he could hear the music coming out of my ears and made me turn it down. So. Rude. He's just lucky he missed me playing air guitar with the paint brush.