When I was young, my mom raised two kids almost on her own overseas.

In a strange country, where we couldn’t communicate well and every day was exhausting.
They say a friend of hers—someone who also helped raise children—casually asked.
“Kids are so noisy, aren’t they?”
My mom, they say, answered like this.
“When you only hear it roughly, it sounds noisy,
but when you listen carefully, it isn’t noisy.”
Decades later, when she met that friend again,
she still remembered those words.
Thank you, Mom, for listening to my noise so carefully.