cracking up.....

Sometimes, about once a month, I feel so fragile that the crinkles around my eyes when I smile seem like little cracks where unknown tears can gush without seeming cause.  Other times life's great circumstances seem to crash in ripping away illusions and revealing my humanity so real and raw that my frailty is hard to stomach.

At ten I entered boarding school while my parents went to another city over a thousand miles away in a country not my own.  My sister, two years younger, fabulous friend, was my tie to all that I had known as family.  Let me tell you a floor of twenty to thirty girls aged 9-12 is not one huge slumber party.  I am definitely damaged but as far as I see it what I carry now from boarding that impacts my current character is the following baggage...

1.   I eat like a freight train.  It was that stinking bell that rang 15 minutes into dinner heralding the fact we could LEAVE for 30 minutes of unsupervised play as the adults sipped tea.  It was the fact that those that ate faster got more, better and hotter food.  The slow pokes were not liked by peers or those that watched over us, who wants to sit at a table and wait while the rest of your friends are already playing a harrowing game of Skateboard Killer.  I still find myself all done before my family has even took a deep breathe.  
2. I  hate pretenders.  We lived together, slept together, did school together, laughed, joked and fought together.  Pretenders hurt others.  Pharisees were not broken, real, or needy.  They were perfect.  There was no perfect on any dorm floor.  
3. Goodbyes are not forever.  There were so many and so many hellos.  It some sad way you learned to live for the moment in relationships and if one went another would come.  It made for deep quick friendships and ties around the world.  Prolonged goodbyes are anathema still for me.  Partly because of Heaven and because The Long Teary Adieu wears thin when you are saying goodbye for the 20th time.  It also takes energy from what you will need for the hello.  Callow perhaps.
4. Lastly I deal with those deep dark things in life that threaten to overwhelm with humor.  Yep.  My dearest friend outside my sister, she, happily, has disappeared into the throws of mommy-hood and hopefully will reappear in 6 months, put her finger on this.  I thought maybe it was some cultural thing I picked up from my Finnish or Australian "sisters" but I think it goes deeper.  We were little dealing with big things.  We were a little older dealing with even deeper things.  Humor was a great God given gleeful thing.  In the midst of tears there was always something to LAUGH about.  I can cry and I do for the pain of others but when it is my pain, my burden I try not to find the silver lining but the chuckle in the chill.  This part of me has taken a huge blow in the last four years but it still is there.

It is about this humor in the black hole that I this blog is about.  This week has been no piece of cake.  Hubster left our "Hill Home" and headed for the plains leaving me with two toddlers to tote around.  I was thrilled.  I planned to eat out every day and have a ball.  I fell down on the mountain path the very day my husband left twisting my ankle (attached to my unshaved leg.....really unshaved...and everyone wants to see it......I am creating clear boundaries and saying NO).  I took my daughter (packed on), my son and my hopes crashing down as a massive Langur monkey pack flew above us.  I was dragged down the mountain by two angels.  We live at the bottom of a HUGE mountain.  We are talking a long walk.....the kind of hike other foreigners take on the weekend.  There I was stuck and here is what has caused me to laugh.

The morning before my husband left he screeched from the bathroom.  There is no pretty way to share this.  He screeched.  Kind of like a tween at a Bieber concert.  It was not manly sounding.  But to give him credit he had a live, breathing 2 to 3 inch scorpion black as the night crawling on his bare foot.  That is screech worthy.  Yeah.  With the monkey troops there are scorpions and snakes here in our utopia.  We've seen it all.

So here I was the next day in our scorpion home at the bottom of a mountain feeling rather bored and sad.  Toddler speak gives me the giggles but pain is a great killer of gracious conversation.  Into my frailty came two lusty healthy ten year old twin boys.  They had the answer for my blues.  

Here is a direct quote.  I wrote down what they said I laughed so hard.....

"You can take a pliers, separate the body from the stinger and keep it (a scorpion) as a HOUSE PET."

The can used in this sentence was a patronizing permission being given to the lady sitting on a chair as balls flew around me.  The pliers they were offering to lend to me which was large of them.  And for the words "house pet" they were what pushed me over the edge into gales of laughter.  They were not impressed and tried to impress me with the seriousness of their offer by showing me where I could keep my house pet in our tiny living space.  

Hope you are able to laugh today.  A good laugh.  Eat a meal quickly and say a quick goodbye with the sweet reality that with Christ whatever is around the next corner will be exciting even if it is hard not pretend to believe something you don't and laugh at something crazy in the world around you.