Laughter and Motherhood

One day this week, my kids and I ran out of the house with score cards to rate my neighbor's lawn mowing performance. My daughter gave the lady a perfect ten. My son, for reasons he could not really articulate, gave her a five, and I gave her a nine (a point off for bad attitude, I said). She turned off the mower as we stood giggling in the grass and flagging our cards. My neighbor rolled her eyes and shook her head at us, but this is my way of keeping the mood light around the house.

I am often much like my own mother was in her childrearing years. She was very serious, very intense, and all business. And while I certainly appreciate her strictness as a parent myself now, what she wasn't was funny or goofy. But I can see why. She had a full emotional plate in those years: difficulties with siblings, caring for terminally ill and elderly relatives, my father's consuming career, her own dedication to graduate school, and then the working of two jobs to put my sister and I in high school and college while she created a name for herself. She raised us without family dropping in regularly to ease the burdens created by small children. My mother was hell-bent to give us the childhood she didn't have because her own holds sad and uncomfortable memories. In her earnestness to provide such stability for us, my mom's sense of humor was not a frequently seen trait. One could never associate her with slap-stick comedy. I often catch myself in long ruts of intensity with my children, remember her as a younger woman doing the same, and I will stop to take a mandatory silly break. It's the way I breathe, and I do this not just for my children and I, but for my mom, even though she is miles away. These moments of humor are episodes I will recount with her later so she can love and laugh with us.

I adore my mother. She has a wonderful laugh, and now that she isn't cracking the whip on my sister and I for fighting and creating general mayheim, I get to hear it all the time. I certainly don't think my childhood was wounded by my mother's towing the line in her straight-laced and straight-faced manner. In fact, my mother was exceptional at providing a myriad of things I haven't seen many other parents give their children in that generation or the ones since: a love of classical music and the visual arts; lessons on how to live within a budget, when and how to build credit, and how to pay off credit cards; the sacrifice of things she wanted so children can have comforts (but not luxuries); how graduation from school is not the end of your education, but the beginning; how and why to adhere to a difficult career choice for the sake of family; and that God sees everything we do. She taught us how to remake, rebuild, rehab, recraft, save, and reuse common items from clothes to pantry goods in order to stretch a dollar and be resourceful.

My mother was magic: she kissed booboos and had a cool hand and soothing voice whenever I was sick. She sewed our toys, our clothes, and crafted ornaments out of almost nothing for Christmas gifts (I still have the full set of papier mache ones she made when I was little. Very retro and I love them.) My mom gave us a fingerpaint set we could use in the laundry room of my first childhood home. She baked our birthday cakes, created fanciful Christmases in the leanest of years, and provided herself as a second mother to girlfriends of mine whose own mothers could be bitter or selfish with their own children. My mom taught me how to love. That she did all of this without cracking jokes much is pretty amazing.

I often tell my step-daughters that I am aware of my being "un-fun" and irritable around my own little ones. I have tried very hard to improve that aspect of household life. Perhaps, like my mother, I take childrearing so seriously that I have a hard time seeing the humor in the chaos as it is unfolding (after the chaos though, everything is funny). I have difficulty laughing at myself and have never taken teasing well, therefore, my teasing others is a rare indulgence. But I know who I am, and my mother knew who she was and what she wanted for us.

This year, I received a slightly suggestive and off-color email joke about the new airport x-ray scanners. You've likely seen these images of a female skeleton in provocative poses. What made the email so shockingly funny was that it was from my mom. Kudos to you, Mom. Keep up the good work.

Bananas, Breasts, and Socks that Stand

This evening a friend called to say she had breast cancer. I felt my breath leave me for a few minutes while she explained the details and then offered a light nod to the situation. She had been complaining to her children that she did not understand how she, of all her family, could get breast cancer when she only had size A breasts.


“With you, Mom, it’s really skin cancer then,” humorously offered one of her daughters.

Humans so amazingly break tension with comedy. Perhaps it is what the Italians refer to as the bittersweetness of life, this ability to find goodness and light in the middle of trauma and hardship. I’ll never forget listening to my grandfather, in his own fight against cancer, rant about lack of potassium. As a grown up, I know now that what he was really yelling about that afternoon twenty-five years ago was not that his doctors were disregarding his body’s need for a particular vitamin, but that he was dying, knew it, and was angry about it.

“What are you going to do if I just pass out, right here, right now, from lack of potassium?” he demanded of my sister and I, the unfortunate witnesses of his tirade. We were no more than twelve and fifteen years old.

“Shove a banana in your mouth?” asked my sister. Silence ensued, and then, in a flood of relief, unexpected laughter.

A close family friend tells this story about his father’s passing when my friend was just a boy. He and his brother were sitting on the edge of the bed, listening to their mother weep and complain. Their father had just died a day earlier and their mother was looking for a pair of socks that would stand up. She was becoming more frantic in her search for appropriate accessories to dress her deceased husband. Suddenly aware that the dead rest horizontally in coffins, my friend said, “But Mom, Dad doesn’t need socks that stand up anymore.” The same response followed, as did in the above two stories: grief broken by laughter.

My girlfriend will survive her cancer. She is one of the lucky ones who was awarded an early diagnosis and a 99% survival rate. I hope her sense of humor guides her through her surgery and treatment. I know she won’t take another day for granted despite the encouraging outcome promised by her doctors. Frankly, thanks to her today, I won’t either.

Best of health everyone, and cheers to your own ability to find a smile in the challenges of your day.

Catiche