Life Lessons

My stiff upper lip English-ness, which tends to keep chin wobbles firmly in check, has taken a bit of a beating recently. I have cried through a variety of teen movies and go all misty-eyed at the slightest touch of movie manipulation: a shift in the soundtrack, a close-up of the heroine's face, an allusion to parent-daughter relationships. This past week alone, I have cried through LemonadeMouth (a saccharine Disney Movie), Mamma Mia (a raucous comedy) and one of Iola's episodes of My Little Pony when the other ponies were being mean to Fluttershy! There have been tears of rage - when my old-person-fingers couldn't peel the lid off a yoghurt pot, when I got trapped in my sports bra; and there have been tears of exasperation - when the physical therapist wouldn't listen to what I wanted to do, when I couldn't knead the potato bread I wanted to make. I've also cried quieter tears of loss over the letter from an old school friend about the still birth of her son, over the news from another friend about the loss of her pregnancy when her ongoing journey towards parenthood has already taken so many years.  

My courage has been battered too. As many of you know, Nathan experiences night terrors which send him careening out of bed in the middle of the night. In the past, I've cajoled him, reassured him, shouted at him, pleaded with him to get back into bed and go back to sleep. Now the sound of him moving around our room in the dark leaves me coated in cold sweat. I have fastened a child gate to our bedroom door and have three torches on my bedside table, because once I've got the lights on I can coax Nathan back to bed and he'll sleep through the rest of the night with no memory of what's happened. But I find it hard to get back to sleep these days.

Laughter comes easier too though: I couldn't tell you what started Maya and I giggling as I put the pasta on to boil this afternoon, but we were still snorting and wiping tears from our cheeks as I dished out the cooked food. Laughter shifts our reality by altering the way things respond to us. These days I laugh when the dog starts growling and huffing at strangers, and he soon gives up on his pretend aggression and asks to play ball instead. 

This evening the hens escaped as I was putting them to bed. Ordinarily, I would have been irritated. Locking up the hen house is a straightforward chore when the hens are inside, and an exercise in futility when they're not. It wasn't what I'd planned and they had no interest in going into the hen house when there were bugs to eat and cut grass to scrat around in. After a few failed attempts to round them up, I took out my deck chair and sat down to enjoy the view. It was a beautiful evening: the mountain piled high with storm clouds to the East, the setting sun making the air heavy as honey, the hens striking picturesque poses among the weeds. Maya joined me. For a while we sat in silence, then we laughed. Sometimes there is nothing else you can do.