[2041] Not All Women Speak 20,000 Words a Day

I think I'm becoming more and more grumpy with age. No wonder old folks are generally grumpy.

When I send bb to her swimming lesson, I am prepared with my noise cancelling earphones, because I want to enjoy my alone time with music in my ears, I have no intention to chat/make friends, I just want some quiet time to read/play gamess and not having to talk to another human being.

From experience, there are some parents who have younger children waiting with them for their older children to finish lessons. That's totally normal. However, their children decide to fight because they are too young to want to share toys. Also, there are not that many toys in the waiting area so the toddlers are bored. Lastly, the parents are having a nice chit chat and just ignoring their fighting, screaming, crying kids who are bothering the rest of the parents who just want to enjoy some alone time in a peaceful environment. We are wired to only accept the crying noise of our own kids, because even though I am sympathetic to parents having to cope with their kids' tantrums, I can't stand the noise. I'm barely accepting of my own kid's whining in truth. When I see parents ignoring their tantrum-ing kids, I'm more annoyed at the parents who pretend nothing is happening than the noisy kids. Do they think we are enjoying their kids' behaviour and volume? If the parents are actually doing something to try to quiet their children, at least I feel slightly pacified and resigned to escape the scene with my earphones and loud music.

Every third week, the swimming school allows parents to go into the poolside to watch. I chose to go in to avoid the noise. After a while, a group of mums came in with their younger kids. (Can you hear the panic alarm going off in my head? Young Kids - Group of mums) And guess what. The group of mums start chattering really loudly. Their children gets bored because there are no toys for them at the poolside. They try to edge towards the poolside. The mums continue chatting very loudly and ignore them. The children keep bumping into me or splash me while they run around. Can you sense my annoyance? The point of the poolside watching is more of observing their children at class. Obviously the chatting mums are just chatting - can't they just do it outside? I got seriously annoyed at them for spoiling the peaceful observation space.

When Ryo and I went for our anniversary meal, we were early so we had the whole place to ourselves. It was so quiet and frankly, bliss. I didn't have to fight to speak over the voice of a child determined to continuously interrupt my conversation with Ryo, I could actually finish my sentences, I didn't have to be selective to pick the most important thing to say to Ryo in the short few seconds of quiet that I could speak when she was chewing her food and I actually had time to slowly think of what I wanted to talk about - random conversations included. I had taken to just keeping very quiet during meal times because the child refused to let me talk to her dad. (which made me feel very angry with her in general for being such a brat). There we were enjoying our quiet lunch, and 2 ladies came in and sat next to us. Immediately, the whole elegant restaurant atmosphere transformed into a noisy cafe. Every single phrase the women spoke had to be in exclamation marks and surprised, excited tones and 2 levels louder than the other tables. (Maybe it was an internal competition to see who could act more excited) I could feel my tension returning, because I couldn't hear the conversation at my own table and the other party and I would have to resort to speaking as loudly as the noisy culprits. Another table of 2 ladies arrived later on, acting the same way. "Oh, you look great!""You too!" "No, this old thing??!" OMG......................