Dad, If Everything Is Made Of Atoms…

My husband and I don’t speak to each other. We haven’t for over ten years now. The thing is it’s not because we don’t like each other anymore or that after ten years of marriage the spark has fizzled out of our relationship and we now have nothing to say to each other. No, it’s none of those things. In fact it is the very opposite. The reason we live in the same house yet never spend any time together and rarely, if ever, speak to each other is because we have four children.

That’s it. That’s all you need to know. In fact I could stop the article right here because at this point every parent out there knows exactly what I am talking about. We had children and we stopped talking (although to be fair it would be more accurate to say we had children and we stopped doing….absolutely everything). We have four daughters who are aged ten, seven and four year old twins and between them they talk non-stop. I cannot emphasize this enough – non-stop. Sometimes to the point where I want to weep or go and hide myself in a locked room. These girls are Olympic talkers and professional question-askers.

It is absolutely amazing how they can conjure up a question based on every single thing that they see and then create a series of follow-on questions based around that thing that was about absolutely nothing to begin with.

In pure desperation I created a new rule with them recently that they can only ask me a question if it is very, very important, otherwise I am going to have to completely ignore that I heard it. And I tried my best to stress this – that it must be vital, it must be of profound relevence and it must be in direct correlation with our surrounding circumstances. To help them out I offered up a few examples which in my mind were pretty excellent. Questions such as;

• ‘Mum, what are we having for dinner today and would you like me to set the table for you?’

 

• ‘Mum, would you like me to clean my bedroom for you, including picking up all of my clothes from the floor, folding them and putting them back on the shelf where they belong?’

and

• ‘Mum, would you like me to do my homework now in it’s full entirety including my reading which I never normally do?’

I stressed to them that these are all very good examples of questions and ones that I will be happy to answer.

Of course none of this actually happened. They all stared at me blankly and about five minutes later:

Little Voice: ‘Mu-um?’

Me (suspiciously): ‘Ye-es?’

Little Voice: ‘Do dolphins live near us?’

Me (sighing): ‘Sweetie that’s not an important question‘.

Little Voice: ‘Yes but this is the only question I’m going to ask, I promise’.

Me: ‘But you said that twenty questions ago’.

Little Voice: ‘Yes but this is the last one, I sweaarrr…‘

And on and on it goes.

My husband too has his own desperate ways of trying to reach me before they can detect his presence and ambush him with a barrage of words. Sometimes when he comes home I have seen him creep through the front door, close it as quietly as he can, slip his shoes off and tip toe down the hall like a middle-aged ninja in the vain hope that they might not have heard him and that he will actually get to talk to me for a few minutes before they realize that he is home.

Unfortunately this seldom happens. Most days one of them will spot the car pulling into the drive and then all you will hear are the maniacal screams and shouts of ‘DAAAD!!’ as the twins both grab onto a leg as he walks through the door and I watch him struggle to amble down the hall, both still clung to him like spider monkeys, our seven year old skipping behind him while our ten year old daughter follows close by pleading with him to give her more playing time on her tablet before dinner. And that is all before he reaches the kitchen. He hasn’t even taken his coat off.

So realistically the only time we get to spend together is at night, when they have all finally gone to bed. That is the golden time, the precious, precious coveted time that you wait for all day. The time when there is silence. The noise has finally stopped, the questions have finally come to an end and you get to sit down beside that stranger who you are married to and watch tv for a while with tea and a selection of chocolate bars and biscuits.

Except that there is one problem. Our seven year old daughter has been learning a little science at school recently (thank you school) and as part of a lesson her teacher told the entire class that everything in the world is made up of atoms. You can see where this is going can’t you? This has opened up a whole new Pandora’s box of questions. The possibilities are endless, infinite you might say. So now every time she walks into a room her question begins the same way;

Seven year old: ‘Mu-um, if everything is made up of atoms does that mean that my shoes are made of atoms?’

Me: ‘Yes’.

and at the dinner table;

Seven year old: ‘Da-ad, if everything is made up of atoms is this broccoli made of atoms?’

Husband: ‘Yes. Now please eat it’.

And a couple of nights ago while we were sitting down in front of the tv under the illusion that they were all tucked up and sound asleep, tea in our hands and biscuits sitting on our laps, we heard the pitter patter of little feet and the door of the living room opening behind us:

Seven year old: ‘Da-aad?‘

Husband (despairing): ‘Yes, sweetheart?‘

Seven year old: ‘If everything is made up of atoms does that mean that my friend Sarah is made of atoms?’

Husband (calmly): ‘Yes it does’.

And then suddenly he had a thought. He turned to her before she had a chance to start going through every boy and girl in her classroom and said;

‘But I have a question for you. If everything in the world is made up of atoms, then what are atoms made of?’.

Silence.