Silence in our house isn’t golden; it’s suspicious. It usually means someone has discovered the permanent markers or is attempting to give the cat a haircut. The normal state of our home is a constant, running monologue provided by my seven-year-old daughter, Chloe, who came into this world with a fully-formed opinion on everything from quantum physics to the questionable structural integrity of a chicken nugget.
Tonight’s subject was dinner. I was stirring a pot of tomato sauce, a simple marinara I’ve made a thousand times. It was my quiet, end-of-day ritual.
“You’re doing it wrong.”
The voice came from knee-level. I looked down to see Chloe, arms crossed, brow furrowed with the intense scrutiny of a health inspector. She had pushed a kitchen chair over to the counter to better supervise my culinary failures.
“Doing what wrong, honey?” I asked, my wooden spoon not missing a beat.
“The stirring,” she stated, matter-of-factly. “It should be a figure-eight motion. Not circles. Circles just push the ingredients to the side. A figure-eight incorporates them. I saw it on a cooking show.”
I took a deep, fortifying breath. “Thanks for the tip. I think I’ve got it under control.”
“Okay,” she said, though her tone suggested she was merely allowing me to proceed with my folly. A moment of blessed silence passed. I foolishly let my guard down.
“Also,” she piped up, “you put too much oregano in. You can tell by the speckle ratio. It’s off.”
The speckle ratio. Of course.
This is my life. A trip to the grocery store becomes a public lecture on why organic bananas are a “scam” because all bananas share 99.9% of the same DNA. Watching a movie is impossible without her pausing it to point out a continuity error only she could have possibly noticed. Last week, she informed her pediatrician that his diagnostic approach was “a bit dated” and that WebMD suggested a different course of action for her mild earache.
It’s a relentless barrage of corrections, unsolicited advice, and observations that are just astute enough to be infuriating. She’s not being malicious; her brain is just a high-speed processor that is constantly analyzing data and spitting out conclusions, and she assumes everyone is desperate to hear them.
I turned from the stove, looking her dead in the eye. “Chloe, do you ever just… not have a thought?”
She looked genuinely puzzled by the question, as if I’d asked her if she ever considered breathing nitrogen instead of air. She tilted her head.
“But what would my mouth do then?”
I had no answer for that. I simply handed her the wooden spoon. “Alright, Chef. You’re in charge of the speckle ratio.”
A slow, triumphant smile spread across her face. She hopped onto the chair and began stirring, her small hands guiding the spoon in a perfect, meticulous figure-eight. And for a few glorious seconds, the only sound in the kitchen was the gentle scraping of wood against the pot. She was busy. She was in charge. And finally, she had nothing more to say.
