Laughter

Uncontrollable laughter...
the kind where you can feel it coming, and you know it's going to be bad.
The kind where at some point you might worry that you are going to pee your pants.
The kind where you make loud noises and tears come to your eyes, and you know you're embarassing yourself, but it's just out of your control.

It started last night at the choir concert when Twin Boy fell asleep.
It just struck me as so funny, because he is SUCH an animated being, and seconds before he was asking to go run around with his friends, talking a mile a minute.
One slow song in and he was OUT.

I looked over and it was a sudden burst of hilarity.
I felt it coming, I was shaking, trying not to snort,
doing the silent laugh that hurts your stomach.
I could feel the people behind me wondering. It was just not THAT funny.
But looking over at him, with his head lolled to the side and his mouth open, just - boom - asleep. It just flipped a switch in me.

That's the way it is with that kind of funny moment. It doesn't really make sense.
It triggers some nonsensical part of you that nobody else understands, and that's part of what makes it so funny.
To you.

Maybe it's hormonal.
I remember attending my first Lamaze class, and going through the motions of breathing.
I looked around and all of the couples were so SO serious.
It just struck me that we were all sitting there pretending to have a baby.

Like, acting it out.

I don't know why, but it just threw me and I started giggling.
At the first glance toward me from some dour serious parent-to-be, I knew it was over.
The look that said, "Rude. You are rude to laugh." It put me over the edge. I snorted.
I tried to stop. The husband shushed me and smiled apologetically to the others.
By then I was in full out laughter - loud, long, gasping for breath and what made it even more funny is that the whole class was silent, continuing on with their exercises,
completely ignoring the maniacal laughter from the one lady who was now lying prone on the floor, hiccuping and not even trying to stop anymore.

I mean, wouldn't you stop, sit back on your heels and try to catch the joke?
Nope. They wrote me off. And I laughed all the harder.

So twice now the Teenager has joined me in an "episode".
The first was when he had to get pictures taken of his mouth just before getting braces.
We had no idea what was going to happen.

I was sitting supportively opposite him.
I was smiling encouragingly as the technician fitted his mouth with.....a medieval torture device.
When she backed away, I was staring at my poor son, who was looking at me questioningly, his lips peeled back away from his teeth with some sort of metal clamping gear - top and bottom.

It was the most hideous grimace I had ever seen. And I just burst out laughing.
Then he did too, and we both went through the whole gamut - the tears, the loss of breath, the guffaws.

The technician just stood there, kind of taken aback.
The more I laughed the more he laughed, and the funnier he looked and the more he drooled.
He had tears streaming down his face - his little Joker face - and I....could....not....stop....

Fast forward to today.
This is SO not that funny.
I hadn't eaten yet and was on my third cup of coffee and I could feel the tremors beginning.
The inner quivering of my stomach. The woozy head. It was coming.

We were sitting in the oral surgeon's office, waiting for the doctor to come in and consult about his wayward wisdom teeth. I told the Teenager of how my brother had posted a question on Facebook: Which would you rather have, a head twice its normal size, or half its normal size?

It set us both off, and we could barely talk, laughing at the question and then laughing at the other person laughing, egging each other on, topping each other with just one more layer of stupidity, just one more silly "what if"....

We were crying by the time I said,
"When that doctor walks in, all I'm going to be able to see is whether his head is proportionate to his body."
Again with the gasping, the falling out of the chair, the wiping of the eyes.

Then he walked in and he was so normal looking it was a let down.

All this to say....

I have no idea why I said all of this.

It's just....sometimes, it feels really really good to laugh.
I highly recommend just letting go. Letting it rip.
Life is funny.
There is laughter to be had.

*