Crunch Time

This is not the essay I sat down to write.

But tonight I made a salad for my family for dinner. It was delicious! Spinach leaves with cherry tomatoes and matchstick carrots, garden cucumber, and thin little slivers of sweet onion, all topped with Parmesan cheese, sesame oil, balsamic vinegar, and—because my family loves them—croutons.

CROUTONS.

CROUTONS WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME.

Surely you have heard of the funny (did I say funny? I meant debilitating) little phono-sensitivity called “Misophonia.” It is categorized as a disorder, which seems so extreme, that is until you are the one in the quiet kitchen hearing one single child eat a crouton.

According to “Cleveland Clinic dot Org” common trigger sounds may include: chewing, tapping, clicking, dripping, breathing, ticking, or rustling. According to the same source, reactions may include: rapid heartbeat, irritation, anger, or RAGE.

Rage. Rage is what I feel. I have this (unfortunate) reaction to a lot of sounds, which is why I often leave places suddenly without explanation, and why I don’t usually eat around or with other people. I don’t like hearing commercials because they usually include disgusting noises like pouring water and opening soda cans. Kids songs are absolutely riddled with nasty audio effects like chomping, snoring, and general mouth-based noises. Life is hard, you guys! But, back to the croutons:

I served croutons with the salad because for all of my weird family, that is “the best part” of a salad. (An actual recent quote from Sylvi lately was “The green stuff just ruins the salad!”) I try to be accommodating with my meals for the family because we are a lot of people with a lot of different tastes, and I think it’s unfair to only make foods that I like. So even though I don’t even particularly like croutons, I put a bowl of them on the table alongside the salad.

Crunch.

They all love croutons.

Crunch. Crunch. Cruuuunch.

I took my dinner out to the patio. It was quiet and cool, a nice post-thunderstorm drizzle happening. Martin joined me, and that was ok. He didn’t do too much crunching …not then.

After we finished eating and delivered our dishes to the sink I said I was going to go back out to the patio to do some writing. I opened my laptop and began a post I’ve been working on in my head for awhile now, about the joy of life and people who have successfully harnessed that joy. I was thinking of Mary Oliver and Tove Jansson. Martin came out just after I had begun typing and started talking to me.

“I love this man,” I told myself, “I will pause my writing and listen to him.” So I paused, and I listened to what he had to say while he was whittling a grass-whistle thing for Sylvi. I think we were having a nice chat, but to be honest, the memory kind of flares into a blank flash of rage because while I was responding to him, he began testing his grass whistle holder.

Do you know what whistling on a grass blade sounds like?

It sounds AWFUL. It’s loud and honky like a sick kazoo. It’s obnoxious.

I sort of sighed and rolled my eyes at him—this was meant to be a social cue that communicated, “what you’re doing is rude and annoying, please stop.” Sadly, this man that I love with my whole heart sucks at reading social cues, and he just kept blowing on the stupid grass. HOOOONNNKKKKKKK.

Despite the absolute rage I felt inside my body, I have been working on my reactions, so I told him pretty calmly that I felt he wasn’t listening to what I had to say and that it seemed kind of rude, especially considering the fact that he had actually interrupted me in the first place, but I had paused my activity for a conversation with him BECAUSE I LOVE HIM, REMEMBER?

He was remarkably receptive and apologetic! We hugged and made up. It was a nice ending.

BUT IT WAS NOT THE END.

The mosquitoes got bad on the patio and there were all these NOISES. Totally obnoxious noises like planes going overhead and maybe some thunder someplace far away, but the really rolling kind that my ears find annoying, and then this particular neighbor who has a moped that is always giving him trouble so there was all this noise of a small engine not wanting to start. It was too much, so I moved inside.

Boy was that a mistake!

Martin followed me in, naturally, because the mosquitoes really were biting and I wasn’t there for him to talk to anymore, and he’d finished the grass blade whistles and given them to the girls. I settled in at the kitchen table to continue my writing, but I had gotten distracted reading a New Yorker article about Tove Jansson. The kitchen was quiet, the article was interesting, but the croutons were still on the table, so what do you suppose happened next?

CRUNCH. Martin ate a crouton. CRUNCH. He ate another.

And then. AND THEN. AND THEN IT GOT WORSE.

After containing my rage, reminding myself of my unwavering love for this man with whom God has joined my soul, the man who is my everything, the person to whom I say truly, “I don’t know what I would do without you,” and after saying nothing and practicing my breathing and letting go, and focusing on love instead of the fact that my skin was trying to crawl off my bones with all these crunching sounds, do you know what he did?

He came over to where I was sitting, and he leaned down, and he gave me a kiss. A kiss from a mouth that so very recently had been sending me nearly over the edge of sanity by crunching croutons and still smelled like croutons because THEY WERE JUST IN THERE BEING CRUNCHED FOUR SECONDS AGO, and I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I would like to announce right here and now that I did NOT lose my mind in the way you might expect! I did not rage! I did not even get angry! I did that thing that people sometimes do after a near-death experience, where they just start laughing and can’t stop, even though laughing is not quite the appropriate reaction, nor their intended one. It just kind of happens. And that’s what happened to me. I couldn’t stop laughing about the croutons and Tove Jansson, and it’s unfortunate that Martin knows me so well, because he knew that my laughter was coming from a place of misophonia trauma so he didn’t laugh, he just felt bad.

But it really was pretty funny. He removed himself from the kitchen to allow me to finish my writing in peace. I told him I was scrapping the essay about joy and moving on to more recent household happenings. He understood what I meant.

Unfortunately, a few minutes later the kids came in and helped themselves to the croutons on the table, which is why I am finishing this essay from the patio, once again, by myself. The moped seems to be dead.