I suddenly realized last week that the first decade of the 21st century is coming to an end. Since then, I’ve been thinking about what the last ten years have looked like for my family and me. I wanted to wax poetic here, but that is best left to the poets in my life. So, to sum up, we have experienced love and loss, victory and defeat, renewed hope and bitter despair. Not much different from your lives, I’m sure.
What made these years, and every year, bearable and illuminated, has been our ridiculous and fairly inappropriate collective sense of humor. Our familial meta-humor if you will. We make each other laugh to the point of gasping for air, pulling stomach muscles and shedding tears.
Even when my brother and I are at total odds with each other – barely able to be in the same room together – he can pull just the right movie quote out of thin air and make me pee in my pants (which is not that hard since I’ve given birth to two children). Or how about the days when my daughter would rather drill under her finger nails than hear my voice one more time, she will sing out “I LOVE YOU, MOM!” which is meant to sound like the F-bomb curse. I always laugh and then she laughs.
But sometimes the feelings are just too big for humor right in the moment, and so we make a gesture in unsure and awkward ways to give each other space for a little while. And sometimes, maybe especially in those times, we need permission to laugh again.
My mother died in 2007. That first week, I cried, but mostly I withheld so many tears that I could barely swallow. A whole gaggle of family arrived at Sky Harbor International Airport that week in August. Twenty minutes later they crossed the threshold of our back door. My aunt Betsy marched into the house demanding, “Where is she? Where’s Mare?” She found me leaning against the kitchen counter. Betsy pulled me close and whispered the most inappropriate and off-color statement in my ear. I erupted in surprised hysterics. For the first time since my mom passed, I let go of a belly laugh, and I let go of clenched sobs on Betsy’s shoulder.
Ask any kid and they’ll tell you that inappropriate laughter is the best. Getting the giggles when you’re supposed to be quiet, or good, or polite is more contagious than a summer cold. Or how about when someone says the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time, and another someone starts snorting? Those are the moments that will unite any group of strangers.
Laughter is the call for emotional presence – for filling up with feelings of euphoria and of overwhelming fear. Laughing when I’m angry (because I’m really feeling sad) helps me come up for air, and eventually moves me into the solution. I said eventually. J Laughter is validation of my victory and my injury; permission to celebrate and to bleed; and the next step toward a dream and a revelation.
Sure it’s all hard and some days are just so unbelievably sucky that I'm just sure the suck can’t get any worse – like when my mom died. Even then, I craved the bridge between the suck and the hope. I needed that orchestra of laughter that I share with my family and friends: deafening howls, snorts, giggles, guffaws, hiccups, and honks. That is where I want to live. Where I want to rest my head. Where I want to feel it all.
