Last week, the Thursday night girls continued our discussion of The Not So Big Life. I pointed out that "noise" was one of the items on my list of things that made me unhappy. As a kid, when things got noisy or rowdy, anger was waiting in the wings in the form of a parent, usually my father. And when my kids were young and we'd take trips, as soon as they started laughing and having fun in the back seat, my husband would get angry and threaten to pull the car over (whoa - shades of childhood fear in THAT statement). It got to the point where they would laughingly say when we got in the car to go somewhere, "Remember, NO FUN ALLOWED!" I say they laughed, but they meant it seriously too.
Sometimes I sat in one room of my house while the kids played together in another. I would think to myself, they're having a good time; can the tears be far behind? And sure enough soon one of them came crying into the room.
The title of this blog entry is a loose English spelling of an expression my friend said was used in her Greek household: Laugh, laugh, cry, cry. I don't know why our laughter often leads to anger or tears, but I've talked before about how closely related gladness and sadness are. Are we afraid of our happiness? Distrustful of our ability to sustain it? Does this distrust come from things that happened in our past that we have drug forward into adulthood? Or are we just made this way, the smiles and the tears very close together in our heads and connected tightly to our hearts?
I still think the best days are those in which I laugh a little and cry a little and there's not too much noise.
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