In the laughter

My sister in law, Sarah, has got me hooked on the show Call the Midwife. I've been binge watching my way through the seasons and am up through the middle of Season 3. If I could, I would watch in all of my spare moments but I can only watch when I'm by myself because no one else in my family is quite as interested as I am in the lives of midwives and nuns in a poor neighborhood in London in the 1950's. They also seem to be a bit squeamish over highly realistic childbirth scenes.

Go figure. Cowards.

I've started having recurring dreams where I am either pregnant or have just given birth, and when I'm struggling with productivity and sloth (as I often do), I imagine Sister Evangeline giving me a stern and entirely necessary scolding, which usually gets me up off the couch. (Usually. Unless I'm in the middle of an episode in which case Sister Evangeline will have to wait.)

It's safe to say Call the Midwife has infiltrated every aspect of my life.

I'd go so far as to say the show has become my own personal Life Coach and that I follow its guidance as close to the letter as I can. Except for the bicycling. I'm too scared of Seattle traffic to start bicycling everywhere.

The other day I watched an episode where one of the main characters suffers a heartbreaking loss (no spoilers, I won't say who). She is struggling to find her footing in a world that no longer makes sense, when she receives some wisdom from an older woman who has fought her own battles with heartache.

In answer to what she is supposed to do now, how does she go on, what does she do next? The older woman says to her simply, "You just keep on living. You keep living...everyday...until you feel alive again."

Last night a bunch of us gathered together again. My CTMW-enabling sister in law and younger brother came into town to visit, which was as good a reason as any to pull together an evening of food and drink and conversation and hugging. (There is a lot of hugging these days. I'm not typically much of a hugger, but I'm coming around. I have to. It seems I can't stop these people.)

There was also laughter. Lots of laughter.

Sometimes I feel like I don't know how to explain the laughter. That if someone were looking from the outside in we would look more like a bunch of silly, party clowns than the bruised and battered tribe that we are.

And then I saw this quote today:

There are three things which are real: 

God, human folly, and laughter. 

The first two are beyond our comprehension, 

so we must do what we can with the third.

~Adapted from a Hindu poem 

We laugh because it's part of who we are, who we have always been, and who she was. 

To stop laughing would be to stop living. It would mean that we not only lost her, but that we turned our backs on her. The laughter is how we honor her and everything she gave us. 

Every time we have been together- noisy, full of food and wine, crammed shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen while the rest of the house stands empty- at some point someone has whispered to me, I swear I hear her. I swear I can hear her laugh. 

Every time.

And I say, I know. Me too. 

I don't know how she did it, but she brought all of these people together. And what a raggedy, eclectic bunch we are. 

But we know how to laugh.  

She taught us so very well. 

The CTMW enabler and Tracy going to battle in our annual $10 gift exchange.
I think they worked it out in the end. ;-)