Inner Voice

“I was wondering,” mused Master 11. “When your voice breaks, does the voice inside your head change too?”

“What voice in your head?” I stupidly asked.

“You know, the one that thinks all the time.”

Silly me but I’d never contemplated my children thinking with a voice in their head - it’s hard to believe that your children, who seem to be continuously making a racket and on the go, have an inner voice as well that they listen to.

Mine is constant. In fact, its flow of narration doesn’t shut down – hence why I’m an insomniac. For some reason, it decides to up the ante at 2am after only three hours sleep. I will find myself thinking about the randomist things and then wonder how I got there. It’s only after backtracking and rewinding the string of linked thoughts that I come back to what started it all.

Sometimes I’ll have an epiphany, only to, a, completely forget or, b, no longer care, due to my sleep-deprived fuzzy head the following morning. This is when I berate myself for worrying about such trivial matters and thereby impacting on the quality of the day.

But us insomniacs just love talking about how little sleep we get and no one really wants to hear. It’s probably almost as irritating to them as it is for the partner of an insomniac to wake and declare how tired they are after you’ve laid next to them all night listening to them snore.

So back to this inner voice; I was curious.

“What does the voice inside your head talk about?” I asked him.

“Oh, just random stuff.”

“Well that was a good question but I really don’t know the answer to it. I imagine, as we grow older and our voice matures, the one inside our head does too. Although we never seem to sound how we think we do,” I shuddered, thinking of all the baby video recordings I’d done in previous years where I’d wished I’d kept quiet.

“Anyhow, I guess only a male whose gone through puberty can answer that so maybe you’ll have to ask somebody else.”

A few weeks later I remembered our conversation and posed the question to a (way past) post-pubescent male.

After a good chuckle, he replied: “Yes, the voice would change in your head because the voice is your voice, hahaha.”

I felt a little dumb but decided to take up my son’s quest:

“But does it change gradually or overnight?”

“Your voice changes gradually, breaking up and down and squeaking so that means your inner voice would break too…”

I sat there for a moment trying to imagine this but, to be honest, it hurt my own head to try and even wrap it around this notion. There was no point turning to Google; my kids have never thought to ask ‘normal’ questions like why the sky is blue. I always got the likes of: “Mum, do teachers ever go to the toilet?” or “Why are those flies fighting?”.

“Oh, because they just are,” was my response to the last one, the kids then being far too young for the birds and the bees talk.

So, defeated, I got back to my son: “You know your question about when your voice breaks? Well you’ll just have to wait and see the answer to that.

“But please enlighten me when you find out – I’d love to know!”