It's Not Funny Yet

After explaining to me why she had been evicted from her second apartment, she looked sideways at me and said,

“Don’t worry.  Someday this will be funny.” 

If my life had a tag line, that would be it. 

The apartment thing is not so funny yet.  I would have never thought the quiet Mayle I’ve known for nineteen years is a girl gone wild out on her own.  I’d tell her that at her age I was raising a daughter, but that’s not necessarily a goal I want her setting right now. 

The time she almost didn’t walk with her graduating class? That’s still not funny.  Well, it has elements of funny.  My uterus still contracts when I think back to that harried week she started and completed the correspondence course that she needed to graduate.  I’m lucky I didn’t deliver Max in the psych ward.  But Mayle isn’t the only one who gives me those moments.  Right now Stancey is running a close second.

Stancey’s moments often involve detention slips in my morning mail or phone calls from her principal in the early evening.  And though her reasons for getting in trouble aren’t necessarily bad, the attitude she spoons back can be. When she was little and she’d say through angry eyebrows, “Quit talking to me!” it was funny.  Somehow, now that’s she’s 15, it’s lost a lot of its funny. 

Now that we’re on the brink of summer vacation, I have this premonition that there will be plenty more of these moments.  I’ve already come home from work to a kitchen full of suds because Madison can’t remember which soap is supposed to go in the dishwasher. 

The topper to all moments are the ones that happen every day with almost every breath.  The steadfast arguing, the not-so-gentle pushing, and the constant chorus from Kenny, “They boys are teasing me!”

And when I’ve had enough it only takes a slow ride past the police station to keep them in line for the rest of the afternoon. 

What’s funny to me is that they just don’t think it’s funny yet.