Gallows humor and people that don't end up on the news

My friend broke the temple today. She is the primary president and they are building a temple out of sugar cubes given for scripture reading done by the children. Almost half a year into the project, she sends the hopes and dreams of 105 crashing to the floor. She's kind of an overachiever anyway. Anybody can break a covenant or break the reverence over the temple. She goes for just breaking the temple. I admire her commitment to excellence.

Am I mean? Is it mean that it is funny to me? I fully recognize how frustrating it must have been, the work involved in repairs, the embarrassment. But when I check, deep down inside, it's still just plain funny.

I ratcheted up the steroids again. The pain and fatigue and confusion have come crashing down on me. I was laying on the couch today with my feet so swollen that I could not walk on them and my daughter sat next to me and took my hand. With a suspiciously sweet look on her face, she took my hand and began singing "Puff the magic ankles, lived on mom's legs...." Hilarious. I laughed and laughed. The kids then made a sport of guessing how many hours tills one of my feet exploded. Juli shut that down with a lecture on gambling. Because apparently it's fine to wonder if your mother is going to explode but we don't believe in betting on when that might be. And that's funny.

I have been reading a lot of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. I have been so attracted to their insight and the language they use to express it. I was going to blog about that. But then I remembered that my Lit teaching friend might get a little anxious if I had a blog that could basically be entitled "Smart talented women who offed themselves". I wondered how I could love their work so much and agree with so much of their insights and still see more possibilities than what they ultimately saw.

I hope it's because I think exploding ankles and smashed temples and chaos are funny. I think humor gets a bad rap as a defense mechanism. I don't know that crying about something is dealing with it in a more authentic way than laughing until milk spews out your nose. They are both ways of seeing what is there. The smashed temple is truly smashed, there is heartbreak and there is humor. What is wrong with choosing to laugh?

I can cry for days about what has become of my health and my daily life. And all those tears are valid. But when you are dealing with the irony of a medication that can make your hair fall out and make you grow a mustache while causing both fatigue and insomnia you have to acknowledge the inherent humor in that. How many people get to look into get a hair transplant from their lip?

Yeah it might be a blocking defense mechanism but I think is more than that. When I cry about something I am acknowledging what it has done to me. And that is OK. Sometimes it is even good and I probably need to get better at expressing those moments when it hurts. But laughing is OK too because it acknowledges not just what a situation has done to me but my power to define it. Finding the humor says "World, I am not your dancing monkey".

I wish that Sylvia Plath would have known that. I wish in her silken fine poetry she could have found one finely twined giggle about the worlds most cruel and heartless husband being famous for his sensitive reflective poetry. Maybe if she could have laughed she could have seen some possibility beyond her head in the oven and her children raised by the woman her husband was breaking her heart over.

Defining is a way of owning. And to own something, we must be more than it is. I laugh and Goliath shrinks, the odds change, and the tragedy becomes a sad diorama in my hands.

Sometimes you just have to laugh.