boys and their noise

My apartment is entirely too small for three growing boys. The 20-year-old had some friends over last night, the 14-year-old was blasting some terrible video game in the living room, and the 9-year-old was literally bouncing a ball against my bedroom wall. I thought I was going to lose my mind. I locked myself in the bathroom for twenty minutes just to have some silence. Being a mom is wild because you love them so much you’d step in front of a train for them, but you also occasionally want to sell them to the circus. Jon actually bailed me out. He came over to pick up some of his mail that still gets sent here, saw the absolute chaos, and just silently packed the two younger ones up and took them to the park for three hours. Didn’t even ask, just did it. It was… really nice. We are navigating this whole dating-again thing so carefully, but moments like that make me remember why I married him in 1998 in the first place.