A child enters your home and for the next twenty years makes so much noise you can hardly stand it. The child departs, leaving the house so silent you think you are going mad.

Holmes compresses the arc of parenthood into a stark before-and-after: the exhausting, omnipresent clamor of raising a child and the uncanny quiet that follows when the child leaves. The line acknowledges a common parental ambivalence—noise as irritation in the moment, yet later as proof of life, purpose, and connection. Its emotional force comes from reversal: what once felt barely tolerable becomes, in retrospect, the very soundscape that made the home feel inhabited. The “silence” is not peace but a kind of grief, suggesting that departure—whether for adulthood, independence, or loss—can make ordinary spaces feel alien and psychologically destabilizing.