Laughing Through the Pain

“Alexa, stop!” The alarm had gone off as it had every morning for the past 22 years at 6:30 am. Time to get up and start off another Monday. I lay in bed thinking how wonderful it is to remember my dreams rather than having them ripped away and tossed into the trash of the mundane workweek that was starting yet again.

I mumbled to myself, “Charlotte get your ass out of bed, this day is going to be the same as all of the rest.” “Get up and go get Cameron out of bed so he can get ready to follow the life steps you have lived ever since you had given life to this beautiful son, who is now a young man just trying to figure out male things  never having a dad in his life.”

Cameron is truly my mini-me in so many ways; we both have an atypical brain, we both are dreamers and creators but forced to live the automatic life of the daily grind just to make the ends meet. I have always enjoyed telling stories and making people laugh, Matt paints the most unique paintings, his imagination is boundless, but they didn’t make up the catchphrase “starving artist” without a very valid reason.

Off I shuffle into Cameron’s room thinking I would have to cajole him out of bed, knowing he had probably stayed up half the night working on a painting. Cameron had been self-medicating with drugs I knew, but he never brought them into the house. I work in healthcare and he knows that would put my profession into jeopardy. Most atypicals are anxious by society’s standards, we don’t fit into the boxes that we are tried to be placed into. Teachers call us lazy, dreamers, and that we never pay attention. School now starts the medicating of the atypicals at first grade because they can’t handle the simmering emotions, the hyper-vigilant behaviors, or the restlessness when the is a big world to explore is right outside the windows. They try to tame our hunter instincts which in fact is what has kept the human species moving forward to the audaciousness that sets us so apart from other species that we share this planet with.

I open the door to Cameron’s room, and he is laying in bed with a tear-stained face and soulless blue eyes staring at the ceiling. With some concern, I asked, “Hey Buddy, what’s going on?” “Mom, I can’t live like this anymore,” Cameron says with a listless voice. “I have figured out how to hang myself, and don’t worry I won’t do it here in our home.”

I sit down on the bed and immediately switch to nurse mode because if I stay in Mom mode, I will lose my shit. I ask Cameron all the appropriate questions that I would be asking if this were a stranger and not my beautiful son. He gives me all the answers that prove this just not an attention-seeking stunt. He has a plan, he apologizes that this will hurt me, but his continued living will end up causing me more pain in his reasoning which is illogical as suicidal thoughts usually are.

The only person that I can bring to his brain to save himself for is his three-year-old niece, who they worship each other as they both have the atypical gene and relate on a wavelength that is somewhat incomprehensible.  I explain to him not to be the first person she loves to have to learn about death from. He allows me and his sister to take him to an inpatient mental health rehab facility and they kept him to get him stabilized from immediate harm. I am not allowed to see him for several days while he gets intensive mental health treatment.

So, after many sleepless nights and days that I moved through the functions of a normal person, Saturday rolled around, and I met a friend for lunch at a patio bar type restaurant. After many glasses of wine on my part, she had to leave for other plans, I moved wobblily to the bar and started drinking water and people watching. I had not felt this hopeless and alone since my best friend and ex-husband had died five years before. With that grief journey I had spewed out three hundred poems and then the well ran dry, When that happened I knew that I completed my journey through that dark time and had learned that his death had become an accepted, sad fact of my life. I sat at the bar and wrote a sad, pitiful poem. But that was not what I needed, my son was still alive, still fragile, but healing, and he nor I deserved for me to fall into that black hole of despair that poetry does to my brain. I wanted to celebrate and be happy, I needed a clean slate outlet to let the pain flow out of but for it to have a positive vibe. I had to keep hope and I had to stay happy for everyone’s sake. I sat at that bar and wrote five pages of comical observations on every person at that bar. Four hours later and countless glasses of water along with a huge tip to Benny the bartender, I went home and slept the most restful sleep that I had in days.

The next day I googled stand-up comedy classes in my city and the very next Thursday evening a new class was starting, and the first class was free. So, I figured what the heck, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and I had no reason to sit at home alone wondering if my son was okay because that was beyond my control. I wasn’t sure I was going to stick with this because the teacher was something a jerk in my opinion. The next week I decided to give it another shot, maybe most comedians have a bit of jerkiness about them like most poets are incredibly sad people. The second class had an open mic afterward, it was raining that night so not many people were there, just the diehard group who came every week.

After the line-up was finished early because of the weather, I stood up and walked onto the stage and adlibbed for the longest five minutes of my life some of the material that I had written at the bar a couple of weeks before. Much to my surprise, I got laughs, they were not expecting a sixty-four-year-old grandmother to be making jokes about getting laid, the Florida Man antics (google it, Florida Man is a thing), and about my son in rehab.

I have continued with further comedy, improv, and acting classes the past year and a half, my son is doing well, finally growing into his skin. He was pleased that I had taken a scary, sad time in both of our lives and gave it a happier, hopeful spin. I have always believed that the universe will sometimes provide us with adversity to ready us for something better, but we ignore the path until we get shoved hard the right way to go. Will I become the next Meryl Streep? No, but I aspire to be Betty White when I hit my nineties. The world needs more laughter even in the face of adversity. Laughter brings out the good feelings in our brains and we all could use a great belly laugh daily, it dulls the pain and provides us hope.

We live in a scary world now and the art of comedy is the last frontier to speak the truth as ugly as that truth might be. Comedy needs to remain free from the cancel culture that is becoming so pervasive. Comedy keeps us real to our successes and failures as a society, if we lose our sense of humor, we will lose our ability to laugh, and we lose one of the most beautiful sounds a human can utter, with only tears to remain.