I always tell my kids that I am freaking HILARIOUS, because I am not always sure that they know. It’s not that I am quietly funny, like Mike, or secretively funny to a select few….I’m not shy and I make no efforts to hide how hilarious I am. All day long, I am doing hilarious things, throwing out zingers, and just waiting for the world to laugh. It’s part of who I am…trying to lighten the mood of LIFE (all capitals, because LIFE is no joke, and it’s a freaking SERIOUS business that often needs levity). So I am goofy and full of shenanigans and I have a pretty sharp wit, because I feel that that is a necessary component of living….to lighten the mood and to be an antidote to the very serious business of BEING ALIVE. I am willing to provide that levity and am pretty much impervious to embarrassment. I am all about having a good time and living in the moment, because life is hard and life is short, and you might as well just enjoy it and try to lighten it for others along the way.
Having said all that….I am also a parent to 12- and 14-year-old girls. Which means I have a constant audience of people who don’t think I am funny. AT ALL. IN ANY CAPACITY. Which is tragic, because…seriously…I am freaking hilarious. Take, for example, what happened yesterday. Grace (the 14-year-old) and I went to purchase new glasses for her. The optician handed me two forms…one was a basic info form, which I passed to Grace to fill out. The other form was more of the same, but with a few different questions, which I took to fill out. One of the questions was “What do you like to do in your spare time?” A bit about Grace…she is an easy kid to raise, gets good grades, and gives us minimal grief. But I couldn’t help myself and wrote “kung fu” as her hobby because, whenever I try to hug Grace (she’s allergic to affection), she physically defends herself from my love, often with a defensive posture and possibly a kick. I recently nicknamed her Kung Fu Grace and have plans in my head for a children’s book series about a girl named Kung Fu Grace and her cat, Hairy Houdini, who may or may not be based on Grace and her actual cat, who is about the worst cat in the history of cats. She dislikes the nickname, so I continue to call her Kung Fu Grace, because I have so few methods of revenge. So when my giggling gave me away, she promptly checked to see what I’d written, gave me a disgusted look, threatened me with a kick, and scratched out her Kung Fu hobby. I let it slide, knowing that I would eventually find an opportunity to write a new hobby in the blank. I bided my time, until she was no longer looking and the opportunity arose for me to write “yodeling” as her hobby. I successfully handed the questionnaire to the optician, and promptly told Grace about how I’d written “yodeling” as her hobby. For the record, Grace does NOT yodel. Needless to say, Grace saw NO humor in what I’d done, but I am still giggling about it, more than 24 hours later. Like I said….I am freaking hilarious.
Sadly, most of my humor is lost on my 12 and 14-year-old girls, no matter what I come up with. Cerebral comedy, physical humor…doesn’t matter. When you’re 12 or 14 and you’re mother is the comedian, it’s just not funny. Because mothers aren’t funny. They’re embarrassing, out of touch, old….but never funny. My 7 and 8-year-old boys find me slightly funnier than the girls do, but not by much. Sadly, the girls have poisoned the boys against my humor, and I may never be appreciated in my time. It’s the curse of being a mom. Or, more specifically, the curse of being a hilarious mom.
Yet I persist. It’s what funny people do. We carry on with the shenanigans, even when the audience isn’t laughing. Even if no one (in my family) finds me funny, I keep myself laughing, which is NOT an easy thing to do. Being a parent of four is NO. LAUGHING. MATTER. Seriously. I’m just warning you, in the event you’re a parent and not already at the point in your parenting career when there is NO LAUGHTER. Prepare yourself, and have a prescription handy (because one or some of you are going to need it). Sometimes I think the secret to surviving it all is the ability to keep laughing, even when the days are impossible and there’s no reason to laugh. Just keep searching for a reason to laugh. Search out the ridiculous and the silly. Find something in the day that makes you giggle. Because these days are freaking hard. And sometimes the silly laughs are all there is to get you through to the next day. And if the laughs come at the sake of mortifying your kid, so be it. I’m sure they deserve it for some injustice they inflicted on you.
Don’t forget…they’ve embarrassed you countless times over the years, too, whether it was when they told Dad that “Mom got pulled over…again!” or when they told their pre-school teacher that mom’s favorite juice is wine. It all evens out in the end, and maybe…just maybe…they’ll be lucky enough to grow up to be one hilarious mother, too.
