Joy as a Form of Defiance

I grew up happy. I was loved. I was silly. Every report card said I talked to much. Too social. As I got older, it felt like something I had to apologize for. Something I downplayed. It was hard to be taken seriously. It wasn’t cool to be happy. Or positive. It made me feel ashamed.

As I got older I saw it differently. Joy for me, from a young age was a form of defiance. Things and people in our home were not always happy. There were secrets. There was shame. There was a low-key hum of anger, always in the background. There was as much emotional consistency as there was inconsistency. Peace was consistently inconsistent.

I got busted for being too loud, too silly, too much. I annoyed most of the people in my family. I still do. I don’t care anymore though. It took me a long time to see that joy, not fighting, is my particular form of defiance and survival. It’s served me especially well these last months.

Joy, as I experience it isn’t an emotion. It’s often a skewering ability to look something dead in the eye and not shrink away. To go for the joke. Life is comedy. And I’m here for it.

At my mom’s wake, my younger son, who was four at the time walked to the casket. He put his little hands on the edge to peer over and see his grandma. Is this a traumatic moment for him? The image of her dead, searing into his brain and becoming an earliest memory, maybe an only memory of her? I didn’t want to pull him away. People die. This is natural. Kids still get it. But I also didn’t want him traumatized. I walked up and kneeled next to him in his little black suit. He touched her face gently. Then I caught him looking at me sideways as he poked her boob. I seethed out a quiet “Don’t. You. Dare.” I can only image the scene as seen from the pews behind us. A mom kneeling next to her little boy, her arm around his waist, his red curly hair and little hands. Little did they know. He hates when I bring this story up and swears it didn’t happen. (So, don’t bring it up when you see him). But the screwball in me recognized the screwball in him. As mad as I was, I had to keep from bursting out laughing. Something so ridiculous right there next to something so devastating.

Flowers that push through cement. Redwood tree seeds that only sprout when a great fire barrels through. Kids who haven’t learned that death is sad. Joy doesn’t give a fuck.

I was 11 when my dad rented a small four-seater Cessna to fly us from our home in San Diego to Michigan and back for a family reunion. It was one of the last legs of the trip and it had been a bumpy, hot, miserable flight. My brother and my mom both threw up into ziplock baggies that we couldn’t throw out the window. Our destination was just east of Pheonix, but we had to cross the Superstitious Mountains and visibility, as a storm rolled in, wasn’t great. The story is actually quite dramatic. We didn’t cross the mountains that day. Instead, we weaved and bobbed through the storm clouds and lightening, finally landing in an abandoned airfield that wasn’t on the map, in the middle of nowhere. We had enough gas to land, but not enough to take off again. As soon as we landed it began to pour. I promptly got on my bathing suit and ran around in the rain. I can still hear my brother and my dad rolling their eyes from here. To be fair, they got us down alive, held our lives in their hands

while I sat in the back with my headphones on feeling glad that if we were to go down, we’d all go down together. I get how it would be annoying that the first thing I’d do is find my bathing suit and run around without a care.

Real joy isn’t an emotion, it’s a defiance. Cancer could kill you. But, joy doesn’t give a fuck.