Proverbs 14, Verse 13
"Laughter cannot mask a heavy heart. When the laughter ends, the grief remains."
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
I admit that I picked this proverb to start tonight with some trepidation. After all, much has been said about humor as a coping skill, and how so much comedy and so called "light entertainment" comes from a place of darkness and pain. You don't have to look very far for comedians and performers who light up a stage, command an audience and enthrall even the most hardened cynic, only to return to a dank motel room or cold home to brood and mutter despondently into a highball. I decided that I didn't want to write about comedians or actors that I know of and respect and admire.
Instead, I decided to write about my mother.
Since my brother-in-law died of cancer last year, my mother has lived in the shadows. Well, existed. To say that she has lived wouldn't quite be so accurate. She has been seen at work, and at birthdays and dinners and such. She has been seen. Seen. Not heard. This has been sort of the story of her life. My mother, before she lived in the shadows since my brother-in-law's death, has lived in the shadow of my father for just about thirty-nine years. His shadow is enormous. He is larger than life, Israeli, effusive, profane, impulsive, uprorarious, gregarious and hairy. My mother is none of those things. Maybe she was once, (not hairy) but I doubt it. She's said as much.
"I used to pretend that my name was 'Cynthia' and I told my teacher on the first day of elementary school that that was my name, and she'd call on me and I'd never answer."
When old friends from school see me and we catch up, the question I'm invariably asked is, "How's your dad?" as if my mother had died when I was a child, or perhaps she never existed anyway. And I get it-- he's memorable. He makes sure you remember him. He doesn't exactly slide beneath the radar. She's the stealth bomber.
Back in college, I wrote a short play about me and my parents, and, at the urging of the chair of the theatre department, it became a trilogy. After reading the first play, his big complaint was, "You know there's a lot of your father in this play-- and he's a great character-- but I think the real gem here is your mom. There's a real quiet intensity to her, and a dry wit, that I'd like to hear more from." So the last play was just me and her, talking in the kitchen. And it was good. I might not think that anymore if I went back and read it, but I remember it being good, and that's the way I like to remember it.
Those nights in the kitchen, waiting for my father to get home, "at 6:37", were good, too.
I've never known my mother not grieving. She lost her mom to lymphoma when she was maybe nineteen or twenty. You're never not grieving after that. My mother's humor is as dry and wry as the coarse desert my father comes from, and her jokes are tinged with the smell of death. She's always told me, during my anxious, crisis moments, that everything will be alright "in the end" and she gives a smile, because she knows that I know that she knows she's talking about when we die, and that she's really saying that nothing will be alright, because how can it be? How can things be alright? I love how, when my son falls and bonks his head, I scoop him up and tuck him close to me and say, "It's alright-- everything's alright," and if that poor schlep could talk in sentences he'd say, "What are you, fucking dumb? Of course everything isn't alright, my fucking head is pounding and it happened because you're a negligent asshole."
One day last month, I was taking the babies out in the stroller, and this spindly old bat stopped me on the sidewalk and engaged in some polite banter, which I hate.
I know your mother from the libary, she says.
Wonderful, I say.
Your babies are thus and so, she says.
Yes, thank you, I say, they are.
Your mother's starting to come back, she says.
Who the fuck are you to say something like that to me, you don't even know me, or her, I want to say.
Is she, I say.
She is, she says, she's really very funny, your mother.
She is, I say.
She says, did you know that about your mother?
I want to rip out all of your veins and make a spider web out of them, I want to say.
Yes, I say, I do. I know that.
I can only make my mother laugh when I'm being bad. That's the kind of humor I learned from her. Pushing the envelope, being slightly uncomfortable, surprising, desperate and true. I don't know what she finds funny in movies and television, but that's what she laughs at in person. When I make my mother laugh, and it's never very hard for for very long, I feel powerful. Like the playwright I thought I could be in college. Like the man I pretend to be when I fix some dumb thing in our falling down around our ankles house. Like the father of twins who changes diapers and feeds and calms and plays. Like the man who's going to be alright in the end.
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