I was chatting with (or was it ranting to??) my dear friend Sara earlier this afternoon. After I ran through the litany of my day, which had me wanting to fall through the floor, I asked her to laugh. "Please laugh," I nearly pleaded. "This day's been so steroidally ridiculous that it crosses over into hilarious. So please laugh." Being a dear friend, she obliged.
Then she offered me her take on the son making me nuts, the daughter driving me mad, and the other son, whose being out in the world gives some top flight jackasses not only the opportunity to stare at him, like he's some escapee from a prison for freaks, but literally to swivel their heads around and continue to stare as he passes by. Twice today, on our walk to the hospital to have his head unwrapped from his 24-hour EEG, I turned around and told people, "STOP STARING. IT'S RUDE."
And there it went. A day that started in stress, with a call that pulled at my heart, banged on my head, and left me feeling afraid to feel hopeful. That's a feeling I actually have with some regularity. Because every time I think it will work out, that another shoe won't drop, it doesn't, and another shoe drops. Every damn time.
So laughter, tonic for the depressed, the fearful, the stressed, the cornered, the desperate, the silly, was my go-to. I need to make fun of the insane circumstances of even this one day because to take it too too seriously would be to deplete my reserves for the next round of crazy, for the next game of "Can you top this?"
There's still time left on the clock of this day, so I get to seek out some more laughter (tossed with a little coating of empathy, I hope) at dinner this evening with my sister. "I might cry. Might want to make sure it's a dark place." "No problem. You can cry. And if the place I chose isn't dark enough, we can go someplace else."
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