Giggling in the apocalypse

the survival mechanism of levity in such heavy times

I don’t know how it all started. Maybe with Maya, our six year old, who looked at me exasperated one afternoon as I was grumbling about the state of her room and said, “Okay Tasha,” with a perfectly executed eye roll to match. I burst out laughing at the absurdity and perfection of it. I have no idea where she got the name (maybe one of the wide selection of TV shows she watches on Netflix that I know next to nothing about, which I’m sure is not the only, but is certainly one of the most egregious signs that we have really “let things go” around here). 

There was something so liberating about it. Family is often a breeding ground for a sort of emotional eternal return. The same people; the same chemistry. Two souls, three bodies, four styles crash into one another over and over and over again within a home and dig some pretty monotonous grooves. Throw in a pandemic and you’ve got yourself a perfect storm of palpable irritation, barely muffled rage (or not muffled at all, as I’m sure is the case in some families), and profound boredom. In the time of the coronavirus, you can feel so damn stuck.

At least there’s still window shopping?!

The absurdity of Tasha taught me something about cutting through our heightened monotony. It doesn’t have to just be the four of us. It can be the seven of us. Or now that Stella, our four year old, is in the act, the 18 of us. 

At first she invented a best friend named Gigglish from the North Pole. He was just visiting. We were all kind of bummed when he left. Then she became a mom with 11 kids. They are a real handful, as one might imagine. Some are in high school, and they’ve been ordered to stay home because of the virus. But Stella, their mom, has to go to preschool some days, so she hands me an imaginary list of all the things I need to know to take care of them. Mostly they take a lot of naps and eat a lot of snacks, which I’m guessing is actually a pretty accurate estimation of what a teenager does during the summer of 2020.  

A marriage, it turns out, can also be buoyed by levity in such heavy times. My husband John and I have invented elaborate personas around each of our trademark irritations with one another. John’s alter ego is an old man with PTSD of unidentifiable origin. Norm is his name. Norm has very big reactions to very small things--like me consistently leaving the showerhead pointing in the wrong direction (Norm’s edit: to spray him in the face when he turns on the water, before he has time to close the curtain) or little dirty feet on the stairs. One of Norm’s main preoccupations in life is keeping the house cool; he coaches the rest of us to keep all the blinds and the front door closed during hot days. Pity the fool that leaves the door ajar making a run for the kiddie pool in the courtyard. (Norm’s edit: but I have to admit that the house is noticeably cooler for it.)

Did I mention that my husband is an extremely good sport? This is him dressed up as a crab outside of our kid’s school to drum up interest in the annual Crab Feed.

My alter ego, gifted from John, is also an older person--a radical second wave feminist, horrified that she finds herself somehow the mother of two children and the wife of an, ugh, man of all things. She stalks around the house all day, dumbfounded at her domestic lot, giving lectures about the patriarchy and neoliberalism as she picks up all the tiny Polly Pocket crap and cleans up cat vomit. She is convinced that the junk mail left on the kitchen counter for her to clean up is a conspiracy to distract her from the real socio-political depravity in the house. No one can ever find a damn thing without her--not a rainboot in the closet or the Cheddar Bunnies in the cabinet. All she wants to do is be alone with her copy of The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner and a vodka soda.

As the British put it, I guess we’re surviving the apocalypse by taking the piss out of each other. As Norm’s favorite TV show puts it, this is us. The vast, dysfunctional, multitude of us. 

We’ll be over here, bursting at the seams of this 1,100 square foot house, multiplying and laughing our asses off at one another as needed. And boy, is it needed.

Curious, who are you(s)?