As part of the Toxic Mom Toolkit Journal Project the next question is:
When you were little what did you think was the funniest thing? What made you laugh until your stomach hurt?
My dad, the beatnik printer, used to always say with a gleam in his eye,
“You can laugh or you can cry.”
When I would take a hard fall on skates and run to him weeping and showing off a fresh scrape he had this act, this routine, that would always leave me dissolved in giggles.
“You FELL? Where? Show me where you’re hurt!” he’d say breathlessly.
He’d scan my arms and legs with his huge hands, squeezing and waving my little limbs, asking me if this or that was broken; could I still feel it? After he determined that I wasn’t actually broken he’d demand that I take him back outside to the sidewalk in front of our house and show him the precise, exact inch of sidewalk where I landed. He was worried that if I hit it that hard I might have left a crack and the Crack Police would come and write him a ticket – which cost money.
We’d get down on our hands and knees and touching the concrete with our fingers, feel around for fissures.
My dad would point to a little normal city street crack and demand to know if I had broken the sidewalk, right there. Maybe we could ‘pin it’ on the little neighbor kid down the block.
“His dad’s a car mechanic. He can afford to pay the Crack Police fines. Not me! Not this week!” my dad would exclaim dramatically.
The routine went on and on until our giggles attracted a little knot of neighborhood kids to help us study the cracks in the sidewalk in front of our house. My father wasn’t worried about little hairline cracks, but big divots that collected dirt and allowed weeds to grow – that would be trouble.
My father had a knack for turning childhood upsets into funny adventures. When the gold fish died we held a New Orleans funeral for it, opening umbrellas in the house and parading down the hall behind him holding the fish bowl up high then pouring it dramatically into a flushing toilet. Then we’d all applaud poor dead Leon on his way to Ocean Heaven.
My dad and I wondered aloud what flowers said to each other and why birds liked to steal penny nails. We gave inanimate objects names in order to talk about them more. We talked and giggled and used our imaginations. Kids cry. But when my dad was involved, tears quickly turned into laughter. We learned that bad things happen, but if you let the bad go, it’s natural to find something funny about it. Laughing is a choice, a habit. It’s a gift from my father for which I am eternally grateful.
When you were little what did you think was the funniest thing? What made you laugh until your stomach hurt?
Toxic Mom Toolkit 