For the mother in pursuit of silence, peace is a mythic beast — whispered about in parenting blogs, but never seen in the wild.

The television blares its eternal symphony of dings and dongs. Some cursed electronic voice chirps into the void: “WHAT COLOR IS THE TRIANGLE?” The children, angelic in theory but feral in practice, unleash a rapid-fire interrogation in their native tongue: Screech, Level 10.

In a valiant flurry of snack hurling and remote-wielding, you summon an offering to the chaos gods — Goldfish crackers, a distracting cartoon, all the right answers to questions you barely understand. You wipe, you fix, you refocus — and then, like a shadow in the night, you slink away.

Freedom.

You breathe. You sit. You remember you once had thoughts of your own.

And then—

THUD. THUMP. SQUAWK.

There it is. Your youngest, brandishing a toy louder than an air raid siren, eyes locked like a heat-seeking missile. He has found you.

You’ve made it. A seat. A thought. A hint of oxygen untouched by snack dust.

And then—

From the shadows of toddler chaos emerges the beast:

Stickyfoot Coldhands, scaled like a popsicle, stealthy like a ninja jellyfish.

They ascend your legs with all the gentleness of a raccoon in a corn silo,

bare feet leaving little damp memories of juice cups past.

Their limbs, carved apparently from elbow-shaped daggers,

jam themselves into your ribs with the grace of a medieval joust.

They look at you — wide-eyed, innocent.

They do not know they’ve just collapsed your last train of thought like a dying star.

They do not care.

And there it is. A bony toddler bottom planted squarely on the ashes of your inner monologue.

And somewhere in the distance?

The gentle twang of your last nerve snapping like an over-wound ukulele string.