We're going to need a bigger gag

So, another birthday is rolling around again and, as a fledgling Grumpy Mama Bear, I only want one thing.* Stilte, stille, silenzju, cisza, silenzio, silence.

Gorgeous, glorious silence.  Second only in awesomeness to sleep.

You see, since becoming a Mama Bear, I am surrounded by noise.  Whether it is the diurnal hyperbabble of Baby Bear, her crepuscular honks and squeaks as she’s settling herself down, the echoes of her bawling that reverberate through my brainpan after whatever sadness has subsided, or the whooshing of my heartbeat I can hear in my ears as they strain in anticipation of the shattering of a peaceful night’s kip, Baby Bear certainly keeps the old lugholes active.  

But that’s fine.  General racket, I’m told, is part and parcel of the whole ‘having a kid’ shebang.

What is worse, what makes Missy Chatterbox’s vocalizations pale into insignificance is something more pervasive and irritating.  Me!

I simply cannot shut up.  Ever.  Drop in on me at any given point and you will find me:

• Babbling like a Gelada with my little girl
• Singing and throwing some serious shapes for her entertainment
• Relaying back, in real time, every single action (however small) I perform
• Vocalising everything that flitters through my mind. Everything. All the time. Ever.

The problem is that, alongside my figure and sanity, motherhood has robbed me of my ability to use my inside voice. And what’s worse, I bedeck my constadrivel with dreadful rhymes. Dreadful rhymes.

It’s not an egg; it’s an eggy-weggy. Our faithful hound has been rebadged a “doggy-woggy” and I seem to be avoiding words that I would previously wield with joyous abandon, but can’t use for fear I break my own teeth trying to bang out a rhymey ending.

Words like Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis which become unstable when a suffix is added, will fall in on itself and either form a verbal black hole or will rip our reality to shreds. 

My new found linguistic "dexterity" has left me sounding like a lobotomised Edward Lear. 

The depths to which I have sunk recently became clear to me when, on a glorious walk in the local woods, I realised I had been babbling non-stop for about an hour and Baby Bear had been. Asleep. The. Whole. Time.

Sweet Jumping Jesus.  Do I do this regularly?  I do! I merrily wander about, talking to a sleeping baby, in public.  I may as well be talking to the pushchair or my handbag for all the legitimacy the presence of a sleeping Baby Bear lends my inane driveling.  I am no better than Radio Guy, Pants Man or any of the other denizens of a nearby high street which, for very good reason, is locally known as Freak Street. 

So for my birthday, I am giving myself the gift of silence.  I’m going to go to a spa and take some time out to shut the hell up and reset and recalibrate my inside/outside voice relay.

Without a doubt I’ll be back to my new old trick the moment I am within earshot of Baby Bear, but I acknowledge that I do need to take periodic breaks from constantly generating noise or I’ll end up like the guy that Grumpy Papa Bear and I recently saw in Asda. 

He looked like the baddie from Raiders of the Lost Ark and he was squeezing fruit.  Wearing leather gloves.

*that is actually a lie.  Grumpy Papa Bear! If you are reading this, I want many things. Many, many things.