If you have teen or pre-teen children and you don’t realize they are plotting to kill you in a myriad subtle ways, you’d better get wise. Society won’t forgive you for leaving those poor, helpless, homicidal maniacs orphaned when you might have done something to prevent it.

One of the ways my children are trying to kill me is through diabolically altering the volumes of their voices so that I hear everything I don’t want to hear and nothing I do want to hear from their mouths.

The things I don’t want to hear are many and pervasive: the screams that rattle my skull from boys chasing each other around the house; the high-decibel appeals for parental intervention as they take turns hitting each other in fully justified counterstrikes; the shrieks of tormenting laughter from two kids who have teamed up into allied mockery against the third, and the wailing, whining cries for justice from the outnumbered victim.

And all of this is before they have friends over.

You would think these children would never struggle to make themselves heard.

This is the paradox; they often speak too softly, though not as often as they scream too loudly.

I possess a supernatural power to make my kids inaudibly quiet, and all I have to do is ask them a question.

“What do you want from the drive-through?”

“Is your homework done?”

“*Mumble, mumble, mumble*”

“Did you brush your teeth yet?”

  *Shrug*

Even in the prime of my youth, I struggled to hear conversations when there was background noise. This is how I unknowingly agreed to random things in crowded college bars by smiling and nodding in response to unintelligible conversation. My children know this about me.

Over the many years since the prime of my youth, my eardrums have aged substantially. My children know this too.

This is how the plan to get me. They drive up my blood pressure with their screaming and yelling. Then, they amplify my hypertension to a crescendo by giving answers I have no hope of hearing when I ask a question.

They have made a sharp skill of looking away, or sneaking behind me, when they offer their mild answers to my questions.

If you are not careful, children will practice speaking to you from a different room, which is a skill I’m sure they learn from wives.

I plan to avenge my own death by not dying at all, not right away anyhow. Instead, I will continue to lose my mind. They will have important questions to ask me soon:

“Can I borrow the car?”

“Can you co-sign for me?”

“Why do you keep running away from the nursing home?”

“Have you made out a will?”

I will answer all these questions with a clear voice and a distant, glassy stare: “I want a vanilla shake!”