catapult magazine

Loving life, loving laughter

by Sophie Blanc

When my eldest daughter was born, I took it for granted that her smiling, giggling nature was what all babies were like but as she grew up and my second daughter joined her, another giggling bundle of joy, I realized that not all babies are like that.  Not all babies smile, not all laugh.  I was puzzled.  I couldn’t work out why they wouldn’t be.  Each child I knew had loving, often Christian, parents who had a sense of humor and plenty of joy.  Sure, my husband and I had prayed over our children during pregnancy, but my friends had also prayed over theirs.

Now, several years on, I am still amazed by their giggles and chuckles.  My youngest especially is the clown of the family and loves to be the center of attention.  When my eldest was crying over something one day, Carys put a ring over the end of her nose just to make her laugh. 

As I look at other families, my friends and acquaintances, and I hear them talking about the relationships that they have with their families, I am increasingly, profoundly grateful for the joy and laughter that I have grown up with.  When we get together as a family, our memories, our stories together provoke laughter, not mocking laughter (we are learning to cut that out), but genuine laughter, together, over crazy things that family members have done, little quirks and bizarre life experiences. 

There was the time when I was a teenager and we were driving in the car in Islamabad with my mother.  Out of the corner of my eye I spotted a man walking completely stark-naked along the side of the road.  I say, stark-naked, but he actually had a hat on — nothing else, mind you!  Aware of my curious little sister who was under five years old years in the car and not wanting to draw her attention to this gentleman, I closed my gaping jaw and said nothing.  A minute later, my mother said in a very loud voice, “Oh my goodness, that man is starkers!” and of course we all craned our heads out the window.

And then there was the time my Dad gave my little brother the job of picking up nails that were lying around the grounds of a weighing station in order to keep him busy only to be aghast and embarrassed when my brother still had the nails in his pocket and was pulled up by airport security when we were embarking.

There are many, many more where those came from. 

As an adult with my own children now, I am constantly adding my own crazy parent life-experiences, like the time my potty-training child pooed on a posh department store floor and I ended up having to collect it and take it home in my handbag because they didn’t have any cleaners available or anywhere to dispose of it.   (If you hadn’t already realized, dignity for a mother is a myth!)

I love to laugh, I love to be around people who laugh and I love to read things that make me laugh. 

I am a blogger and a blog-reader.  One of my criteria for the blogs that I read is do they uplift me and make me laugh or do they depress me and cause me to compare myself unfavorably to others?  My delight is to read about other people’s honesty ability to laugh at themselves or ridiculous situations. 

I find that if I hang round with people who love to laugh, I enjoy life so much more than when I hang around people who are angry or bitter.  I become like those I hang out with and every so often, I find that I need to censor my friendships — not cut those unhelpful friendships off, but certainly to limit them and to spend more time with those who love to laugh, if only for my own sanity.  I have to ask myself, “Who are you becoming like and do you enjoy who you are becoming?” We only have one life and I have no desire to waste mine by being sour and miserable.  I want to invest as much laughter in my time as I possibly can.