Learning #37 : Just Laugh When Things are Silly

Minnesota just became the 12^th state to legalize gay marriage, which is awesome.  Even more awesome will be the point at which, rather than “gay marriage” or “same-sex marriage,” this entire issue is more appropriately referred to as “marriage equality,” and it will be in retrospect and written about in sentences that say things like “Before the Supreme Court ruled for marriage equality, gay people were not afforded the same rights as everyone else.  Silly, right?”

But, for now, I’ll take Minnesota.

Living in the Bay Area, it’s with a great deal of fascination that I watch other, presumably more conservative states afford the same rights to everyone regardless of sexual orientation, while we in California had a San Francisco moment of freedom (thanks, Gavin Newsom!) and then a statewide 3-month tease of equality followed by, you know, Prop 8 and lawsuits and Mormons showing up at my door to tell me why marriage should be between a man and a woman and then more lawsuits and a decision and an appeal and a Supreme Court hearing and all that jazz.

Sigh, California.  Come on, folks, seriously now.

I have a same-sex household and a 2-year-old.  She is happy, she is healthy, and she is being raised by two people who love her and put her interests first and feed her organic, locally-sourced home-cooked meals and moved to the suburbs for better schools and a safer neighborhood and, overall, take a great deal of time and energy in making sure that we parent as thoughtfully as possible.

And it is for this reason that we were just off the 5 North recently, in Patterson at the gas station, on our way back from an L.A. road trip we’d taken so that my child could hang out with her grandparents, her aunt and her cousins for a few days.

We were primarily in Patterson because we’re potty training, and as any parent knows, potty training and road trips go together like marbles and molasses.  So, off I went into the mini-mart to praise my child enthusiastically for using a public toilet and then, of course, to scrub her down thoroughly after she touched things I wish she hadn’t.  (Nerdy parenting tip: one of the few advantages of the roughness of your average gas station bathroom paper towel is that it creates a loofa effect.)

On our way through the store, we passed a group of sunburned and ebulliantly intoxicated folks wearing team T-shirts of some sort.  One group was royal blue, one group was fluorescent green.  They were carrying 24-packs of domestic and shined bleary smiles the way of my prancing toddler on our way to potty domination.

The other half of Team Bright Shirts was outside, split into two cars and hanging out in and outside of them, and one guy in particular was drunk out of his mind, standing outside the car and bellowing loudly.    As we walked out the store, he started yelling something over and over againt that I finally realized was him yelling, “Loud and proud!  Loud and proud!  Loud and proud!”  

Being a person whose uncanny grasp of the obvious is often left in her other pants, I thought, “Oh, how sad, he’s totally yelling at that gay guy, and That Gay Guy looks really upset about it.”

That Gay Guy then looked at me, stricken.  And it suddenly registered that he was wearing one of the blue T-shirts.

I then noted that most of Team Bright Shirts was looking really, really embarrassed.

And, rather belatedly, I realized something:

Um... this guy is yelling at me.

Or, to be more specific, this guy is yelling at me and my 2-year-old child, who is clutching both my hand and her congratulatory pretzels after an epic potty break on the 5^th hour of a road trip in which she’s been, truthfully, unbelievably well-behaved.

Hmm.  OK… this is… um, actually, this is hilarious.

And so I just started laughing, without any anger or defensiveness or anything in me other than an honest laugh.  There was something just so incredibly hilarious about this drunk, sunburned, logo T’d buffoon slobbering all over himself so that he could try to publicly shame a tired Mom 5 hours into a road trip and, in the process, let her tiny, sensitive, aware and present child know that something about them was worth this sort of public ridicule.

I suddenly felt like I was in the middle of a “Daily Show” sketch.  Because, really?  This is the face of “traditional marriage” and "family values?"  This is the guy in California who voted against my rights?  This guy? 

This is utterly ridiculous.

And, as someone who finds the utterly ridiculous pretty freaking funny, I laughed.  And this surprised the rest of the Team Bright Shirts, who were apparently expecting a different reaction.

As we walked by, the guy kept yelling “Loud and proud!  Loud and proud!” ever the more loudly and proudly despite his friends trying to shut him up.  So, in passing, I looked at That Gay Guy (Who Probably Wasn’t Gay After All, But Who Knows?) and made eye contact, and gestured toward his bellowing friend, and I said:

“I’ll say!”

And then I started laughing again, because the horrified faces of Loud & Proud’s friends just made the whole thing that much more vivid.

It was at this point that my offspring looked up at me and asked, “Mommy, what is that man doing?”

To which I answered, “Darlin’, he is yelling like a fool.”

Being at an age wherein agreeing with us by repeating our sentence structure is a great source of pride for her, she said, “Mommy, he is yelling like a fool!  That's silly!”

Indeed.

And so I heartily agreed with the offspring's astute assessment and, very pleased with herself now, she repeated this phrase all the way back to the truck* while Drunk Silly Guy hollered at us and I giggled fairly uncontrollably.

So just remember, folks: when the world seems unfair and we have our social setbacks, keep laughing.  Because I have a hard time believing that anything that manifests itself in such utter silliness has a chance to stick around for all that much longer.

*Yes, it is a pickup.  Hee.