Voices in the static

The baby monitor: A useful and often annoying device aimed at providing comfort to worried parents.  I hear stories told of days long gone, when parents couldn’t hear—and didn’t care to hear—the shouts and begging of a child in bed.  Nap time was nap time, and no amount of pleading or tears would allow the little person to triumph in the eternal battle of parent vs. child. Then some moron invented the baby monitor.

Thanks to whoever that may have been, my nerves are eternally on edge when my daughters sleep.  My ears, straining to pick out any groan or grunt emitted from a child’s mouth, ache from the effort.  But I wasn’t always this way.  I’ve been conditioned.  I’ve learned that if I stifle a cry quickly enough, the kid is likely to go back to sleep instead of waking from a nap or keeping me up precious minutes in the middle of the night.  So I listen, and I strain, and I jump into action when needed.  In our house, the baby monitor is always on, and I’m always listening.

Unfortunately, I listen even when the girls aren’t home, because there’s a speaker in my office.  I never think to turn it off.  It hums with occasional static and glows with its tiny red light.  Hardly a nuisance.  But the other night something strange happened.

The baby monitor talked to me.

At around 11:30, as I nestled up to the computer to type more lines of unending, indecipherable code, I heard a voice.  The girls were NOT upstairs.  Nobody else was home; at least, no one of whom I was aware.  Still I heard the voice.

It was a child’s voice, crying and begging for something unintelligible.  I stood and stepped closer to the speaker.  The voice went quiet.  I sat down, thinking myself insane, when I heard it again.  More crying.  More begging.  I listened for several minutes, trying to make out the words.

Suddenly there were other voices.  Another child began shouting with the first.  I returned to the speaker, but the noise stopped.  I went upstairs to listen, but heard nothing.  The house was dark, and the world slept.

I returned to the basement and listened.  The voices were faint, crackly, filled-with-static, like an old vinyl recording.  I began to panic, to imagine the impossible, to think the past had somehow infiltrated the baby monitor and a previous episode of my life was replaying itself for my ears alone.  Or maybe I was just tired.

In any case, the next voice to appear was a woman’s, and despite the static and crackling and obvious displeasure in its tone, I found it rather soothing and remarkable.  But WHAT THE HECK was it doing in my baby monitor?!  Who were these people?  Whose voices filled my office with this haunting, supernatural aura?  And how could I make them stop?

After thirty minutes of insanity, I finally unplugged the speaker and went to bed.  The voices in the static told me I needed sleep far more than I realized.

It was at that moment, when my head hit the pillow and a warm breeze blew in through the window, I finally understood.  Whether the answer revealed itself to me or whether I deduced it the exact second before the facts became apparent I will never know.  But gusting in through the bedroom window, caught on the breeze, was the sound of two fussing children and a mother calming them down.  I went to the window and searched the neighboring houses for bedroom lights shining through drawn curtains, but I never found the responsible dwelling.

Most baby monitors run on a similar frequency.  In the absence of my own children’s voices, our baby monitor decided to sneak a listen at someone else’s.  Seems even the baby monitor gets lonely when the children aren’t home.  Happens to the best of us.

Thankfully, it seems parenthood hasn’t made me insane just yet.