Sound Effects *

 Seems like quite a few of you were able to relate to my husband’s…..gee, what would you call it?  Inattentiveness?  Funkyear?  DEAFness?  We all blame it on age, and it’s true that our hearing gets worse as we get older, but, since I refuse to call him or myself old, we’ll blame it on other things.  (At least until we’re too old to use them as excuses)

Like:  

The vibrations caused by his voice when he asks a question are still reverberating in his head when I answer him making it impossible for him to hear me correctly.  

Or,

The sound of my voice irritates him so badly, he subconsciously (because why in the world would he do this consciously) tunes me out.

Or,

Because he’s a man, he’s not really interested in the answer, he’s just trying to give the appearance that he’s actually listening!  (Yeah, I bet you men thought you were pretty brilliant with that one.  Too bad I’ve got you figured out.)

To a certain OD friend of mine, I’d like to mention also, that men often seek straight to the point, short answers and comments.  Their brains, I’ve learned, are too lazy to hear a long drawn out explanation (a "thorough explanation") of anything.  I call it "MADD," Male Attention Deficit Disorder.  It not only effects their ability to listen and hear, but, it effects their shopping skills as well.  They just want to go to the store, walk straight to the object of purchase, pay for it and leave.  THAT’S why they won’t go shopping with us.

Anyhow, whatever the reason may be, I find myself often repeating what I’ve said when he doesn’t quite seem to get it right.  

Just to be fair to you men out there, we women suffer from hearing problems – "funky-ear" – sometimes too.

Before I discovered I had sleep apnea, which appeared during my first pregnancy, I developed a real annoyance towards our "obnoxious, noisy neighbors."  We lived in a third floor apartment building in a college area complex.  At that height, you could hear just about everything in the surrounding area.  Hubby couldn’t figure out what I was ever complaining about, he thought the neighbors, whoever they were, were quite polite and quiet.  

That’s around the time I started accusing him of going deaf, I think.  

Every night, for what seemed to be a month, I’d no sooner fall asleep when I’d suddenly be woke up by the sound of someone slamming metal trash can lids together.  It drove me crazy.  I’d get up, walk around the room trying to figure out where, outside, the sound was coming from but by the time I got to what I thought was the right window, the sound would stop.  I believe, at one point, I even opened the window and yelled out to them to shut the hell up.  Husband would roll his eyes at me and accuse me of "pregnant brain" which is just another way of saying I was crazy – he had heard nothing.

Then, one night as I was lying there cussing under my breath at these horrible people, I put my hands over my ears in frustration.  Imagine my surprise when I realized the sound was coming from inside my head!!!

For any of you who don’t know what happens to people with sleep apnea, I’ll give you a long drawn ou….err….thorough explanation.  As we fall into deep sleep, just before REM sleep, our bodies relax completely and we enter a stage of sleep that causes near paralysis.  This is to prevent us from acting out our dreams in our sleep.  Anyhow, for those with sleep apnea, when our bodies reach complete relaxation, our throats will relax to such a degree that it closes off our airway.  For a few moments to a minute or so, we are not breathing and our brains aren’t receiving oxygen.  When this happens, the brain reacts by waking us up just enough to trigger the muscles in our throat to contract and open the airway so we can resume normal breathing.  As soon as normal breathing resumes, oxygen rich blood rushes back into our heads.  

Sometimes the back rush of blood into the head is so strong, it actually causes an instant head-ache – and in some rare but serious cases, a stroke.  Most often, though, the instant flow of blood is just strong enough that you can hear it rushing into your head as it passes through veins near your ears.  The sound is like that of an ultrasound of pulsing veins or a pregnant woman’s baby’s heart beat.  

Or, the sound of far off metal trash can lids being obnoxiously banged together!

Yeah.

So, we can’t always blame it on age.

Remember how I said that my son is supposed to have "perfect" pitch?  When hubby read that part of the Auditory testing, he pooched out his chest and said very proudly, "Yeah, he gets it from me."

Bwahahahahahaha!!!!

So what, if he’s the senior musician in the family and his kids have taken after him in their musical talent.  I used to be able to sing fairly well, (not so much now after nineteen years of yelling at children), so why couldn’t some of that talent have come from me, too?  Cathy has a talent for singing – she was always in perfect tune to the notes of a song even from the age of two.  Even if she didn’t get the words to "Itsy, spitsy spider" right.  *snarf*  She’s not too bad figuring out how to play a song she’s heard on her keyboards, either.  Allie and Liz couldn’t vocally carry a tune to save their lives but they have a very talented ear for music.  Both of them play beautifully in orchestra.  

Then there’s my son.  He doesn’t sing words to songs.  He’s able to immediately recognize when something is out of tune, and he’s pretty good vocalizing the melody of a song, but he never sings words.  He’s like his father.  He hears in terms of rhythm.  I had a horrifying night mare not too long ago that my son became a "beat-boxer."  He’s always mimicking sounds.  When he’s not wandering around the house buzzing with his usual humming to some rock-n-roll tune the family’s been listening to, he’s making sound effects to the rhythm of his thoughts. 

I was beginning to consider having him join orchestra – like his sisters – to learn how to play the base (*edit: I’m a dork, that’s BASS), but when I had mentioned it to husband a few months ago, he whined and fussed about how he needed a rock-n-roller in the family like him – not some boring orchestra plunker.  I said, "Listen to the boy, dear, he’s already a walking rhythm machine."  

To which he said, "Great!  I’ll buy him a set of drums!"

AAAHHHHH!  

Good thing we can’t afford them just yet….But wouldn’t you know it, the boy came up to me the other day and said, "Mommy, I want to learn how to play the drums!"

Okay, so the husband won that one.  

Speaking of hearing things, though, we all experience certain anomalies we can’t explain.  Right?  Unfortunately…I seem to be the only one in this house that is able to hear the really annoying, rhythmic generator sound, in the neighborhood.  It thrums away night and day, on and off, all the time.  I know it’s not in my head – it goes away when I cover my ears.  Yet, it’s there, constantly thrumming away at my ears making me nuts.  There’s even times when the sound is so deafening to me, I’ll go around the house and close all the windows.  The reaction I get is a bunch of dead stares from everyone as if I’d suddenly become schizoid.  Hubby doesn’t hear it.  He says it’s a symptom of early senility.  The children don’t hear it.  They’re convinced I’ve been abducted by aliens.

"But it’s there!!!" I exclaim in defense.  

I’d ask my neighbor if she can hear it, but, I’m afraid that she’d blame it on the ghosts in her house.  She’s the crazy one.  She actually sees things that aren’t there!

Admit it, you’ve heard sounds before that other people couldn’t hear, right?

"RIGHT????"

Umm….do you hear crickets?