“LAUGHTER”: THE KIDS WILL NOT BE FINE, AND THE BABY DOESN’T BOUNCE
By Jacquelyn Toupin, 1st Place, Non-Fiction
A belly laugh. It comes from the depths of the body, tightening in the stomach as if to hold in as much life-sustaining joy, for the longest amount of time.
My earliest memory of a belly laugh was the time my two-year-old brother tipped his ride-on car into the kitchen cabinet and fell forward, head pressed against the ground, sandwiched between the toy and the cupboard, legs in the air, flailing as he screeched for his white horse. The laughter rose up from the earth and lodged itself into my 8-year-old centre, robbing me of breath and filling me with life.
And then my parents divorced.
We left the only home I had ever known. We left those cabinets and that ride-on toy and the clothes I had been wearing on that day. I went back to visit my dad in that house only once because it was too sad and too empty, and my mom, my white horse, wasn’t in that kitchen to catch us.
The house that was once our home became a vacuum.
People like to think that children bounce. They say it all the time, and while I’d never recommend someone stay stagnant in an unhealthy union, repeating phrases over and over about how ‘the kids will be fine’, simply isn’t true.
The kids will not be fine, and the baby doesn’t bounce.
Children are fragile.
They are the human embodiment of a butterfly wing, touch it the wrong way and they may live, but they won’t fly.
I can cry at television commercials, especially Christmas commercials. I’ll devote an entire December afternoon to a Youtube-sized stack of well-financed holiday ads and a box of Kleenex. I can talk feelings. I can help you draw the connection from the childhood trauma that fuels your current disfunction, and I can advocate like a mother, but laughing doesn’t come easily to me. It’s conscious and thought out and rarely instinctual.
I’ve spent my life silently observing how people voice joy, the sounds they make, asking myself, “can I emulate them?”
My grandmother, a poised and stunning woman, even in her 80s, was a classic beauty with a trim waist and a reputation to accompany her class, yet she also laughed with a snort, as though her laughter broke through her nose like a damn holding back years of emotion. I have a friend who laughs a lot, at little things and big. My father, firm and rough on the outside, humble and hurt on the inside, had a roar to shake our house but a laugh which still rings in my ears ten years after his sudden death. A laugh is like a signature, and yet, I’m still forming mine.
Instinctually, I rely on words rather than sounds to share spontaneous joy, though I’m happy to report, it’s evolving. What gets me laughing deeply these days? My quiet, timid boy who can be found squirrelled away with his sketchbook, giggling at his own creations with a laugh that could only be described as ‘evil’ (muahahahaha). There was also the time, my bonus child used the back of a papasan chair as his turtle shell. He was 15. And most recently, the time my beanpole of a husband came down squished into pants far too tight for his evolving dadbod. I have to admit, it was really his denial and proclamation that “they still fit!” that sent the laughter directly up from the ground and straight into my belly, before erupting into tears and boisterous joy. Though he may not share the same sentiment, I’m happy to report, I’m still living off of that one.
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