LOL

I have a really bad habit of laughing when my son falls down.  I suppose I partly have America’s Funniest Home Videos to blame, who taught me and the rest of the country to grab the camcorder and cue the laugh track every time a person of any age slips and falls.  I can’t help it.  My son makes the face when he falls.  He sticks his lip out and his face gets really long and he looks like an inconsolable baby duck, and it’s just plain adorable.  It’s the pre-breakdown face, the one that could end up going either way depending on how much attention he feels like he needs on that particular day.  He could tuck the lip back in after a minute or so and be done with it, or he could turn that quivering lip into a scream and turn on the waterworks full blast.  To my husband’s family, this is the saddest face they’ve ever seen and it breaks their hearts.  The face draws out their most sincere responses of “Aww, poor baby” and demands their instant sympathy.  They are good people.  My family, on the other hand, sees the face and we do the thing that my family does best, we laugh at my poor son.  I’m starting to get a little better by turning my head, or covering my mouth, but my son still knows that I’m laughing at him.  I’ll look over and see my brother and mom covering their faces too.  He’ll get no sympathy from us until we get this out of our system.  Get ready to think badly of me; every time I laugh at him, he says “No, mama!” and shakes his head, reminding me that I’m a terrible person for thinking that his recent pratfall was hilarious.  (So that you don’t think I’m the most terrible person, I’ll just remind everyone that I only laugh when it’s obvious that he hasn’t severely injured himself.  I’m not the devil, you know.)

This laughing thing has gotten me into trouble many, many times.  When I’m not having anxiety dreams, I’ll get woken up by my husband because I’m laughing in my sleep.  I must have funny dreams, although, I can never remember what’s so funny the next day when my husband asks “What were you laughing about in your sleep?”  I guess I just crack myself up.  Ask my husband, I do this at least two times a week.  When I worked at the university, my boss used to hear me and the girls laughing from back in her office and she’d call out, “Do you ladies need something to do?” like we were twelve year old girls who can’t fall asleep at a slumber party.  In school, I used to get called out by the teacher for laughing.  It was usually at my own joke.  And God help me if anyone in church does anything remotely funny.  You are not supposed to laugh in this most sacred of places and yet inevitably that's where someone burps or makes a toot sound, and it forces you to be immature in the House of the Lord. 

I have mostly my family to blame for these inappropriate fits of laughter.  I blame them for most of my issues, anyway.  I guess when you grow up the way we did, you realize that it’s better to laugh your way through life than to cry.  In the last three years, I have often had to remind myself that if I wasn’t laughing, I’d be crying.  I just don’t want to be sad all of the time.  Watching someone die of brain cancer is not funny.  Watching your father reach out and pat one of his chubby nurses on the behind and say “Boop,” when she bends over and then say, “Well, what else am I supposed to do with it?” is inappropriately hilarious.  He would have never done anything like that unless he was sick.  So we laughed it off because the opposite of that is just too sad. 

My sister was over at our parents' house one time helping her husband load some two by fours onto the back of his truck and she wasn’t looking when she threw one back, so instead of landing in the bed of the truck it flew straight into the back window, shattering it.  My brother in law was fuming since the words “Watch where you’re throwing that…” just came out of his mouth in slow motion mere moments before it happened.  What did my sister do?  You guessed it.  She laughed.  And laughed and laughed.  She laughed all the way home later that day with the wind whipping hard through the busted out window of the truck.  And she still laughs anytime we bring it up.  She didn’t mean to but once the dirty deed had been done, nothing else could be done about it except to laugh, which she did, much to my brother in law’s chagrin.  And you think I’m bad.  She’s the queen of inappropriate, nervous laughter.  It’s still a sore spot for my brother in law every time he tells the story, made ten times worse by the giggles of my sister in the background.

I don’t know if this happens to you but when I’m the only person laughing at something and nobody else is laughing, it just makes it that much funnier.  I had my own marital set back when my husband asked me one night to give the back of his head a quick trim for an upcoming event at work.  I haven’t cut my husband’s hair since before we were married, when his dad took over doing it.  I begged my husband to please don’t make me do this, go spend a few extra bucks at the closest Great Clips, because I was scared that I’d mess it up.  He promised me there was no way I could mess it up because he attached a certain device to the end of the clippers and all I had to do was zip, zip, zip.  “Like this?” I said as I zipped a bald spot right in the back of his head about the size of a half dollar.  I said, “Uh oh.”  I felt hot.  I pursed my lips, knowing what was coming, and looked down, then back up, turned my head, and did everything I could think of to contain myself.  A slow leak of breath like laughter came out of my nose.  Then I started snorting.  I said through my snorts, “I don’t think anyone will notice.”  When he looked in the mirror and saw what I had done, he was furious.  “Carrie!  People are going to notice this!”  When he looked at my face and saw that I was red and crying from restraining laughter, he had to physically leave the house it made him so mad.  I erupted in boisterous laughter.  I felt just terrible about it, I really did.  He just couldn’t tell.

I’m finding that this laughing thing is also not conducive to disciplining my son.  He’s too much.  Along with the face, my son can throw some of the cutest fits.  He recently started doing this thing when I correct him or call him out on something.  He rolls his eyes.  I know that in about ten more years that crap will not be cute, but to see a two year old roll his eyes busts my gut.  If I say, “Buddy, don’t touch that,” he’ll look right at me and slowly touch whatever it is I told him not to.  Right now it’s the Christmas tree.  He is testing every single boundary I am working so hard to establish and sometimes it wears me out to the point of delirium.  At the end of some days I think again that if I wasn’t laughing I would be crying.  Don’t get me wrong, we know fully well that sometimes I do cry.  But when I tell my son “no” and he looks right at me and throws a car into the air, letting out an “uh” after he does it and then catches my glare to see what I’m about to do next, I can’t help but smile.  “Buddy,” I’ll say in my most disciplining tone, trying to contain my laughter, “Don’t do that.  Go pick that up.”  He’s obsessed with the letter “w” now and makes me write it about a hundred times a day on his dry erase board.  When I’ve had enough and I can’t take it anymore I’ll say, “Mama doesn’t want to write ‘w’ anymore.”  This crushes him and he cries in his most desperate plea, “Wetter dub-a-you.  Wetter dub-a-you!!”  It’s pathetic and hilarious, and it’s during these times that I thank God for moments when I can look my son in his sad little face, forget about the power struggles and the embarrassing trips to the mall, the stages of development and those uptight parenting responsibilities, and I can just throw my head back and laugh out loud.