Scategories...laughter..."being" human...recognizing in another a desire to participate...
My family and I--my mother, sister, aunt and cousin--are playing a game during a holiday gathering. The game is Scategories and I am sitting on the couch in the living room with my legs folded under me sitting forward, tense with playful competition while my niece, Ari, occupies herself with baby puzzles and books on the floor.
A round of Scategories has just ended and we are reading our answers aloud to tabulate points. My grandmother reads her answer, and the room bursts into laughter. The kind of belly-laughter that can almost make your eyes swell with tears.
As the room quiets, merely seconds after the laughter had died down, we hear an exaggerated little laughter on the floor. I look over to see my niece, who is 10 months old, throwing her arms up in a kind of motion you'd only see in a move with a child actress (and a bad one at that).
The room is suddenly silent as Ari stares at us intently seeking approval for her "performance". She laughed. She laughed not in self-amusement; she laughed because we had laughed. Simultaneously, the room roars in response to her laughter. We laugh ten times harder than we initially had, so hard that our laughter makes Ari jump--she does not anticipate such a response. Eventually, though, Ari laughs too. We laugh together. We laugh together at the same time for very different reasons that none of us can, at the time, explain.
We are shocked. We are stunned. And our disbelief of what has just happened, something as simple and as complicated as laughter eventually returns us to our game after a few adoring remarks about Ari as she flashes us a coy smile or two.
I have loved my niece from the moment she was born. I do, in a sense, believe that. However, this one moment, a moment that I couldn't even talk about at the time, and still struggle to explain, has incited a love for her (and my other nephew and niece) that is so deep. I will never forget it and, still, the simplicity of this moment almost brings tears to my eyes.
You see, I do not have children, and before this event, I saw children as beings that passively are "raised;" that are taken care of and shaped and molded. Yet, at that moment, I saw my niece as someone desperately trying to figure out how to fit in, how to be human--how to participate in our family's interaction and, more broadly, how to be in the world.
Obviously, Ari's motive that day was simple: to laugh with us. Yet, I see that simple act as doing so much more. Her participation in our laughter did shape her and will shape her. But her laughter also shaped us. It reminded us that although we human beings are born into the world, "being" human, being in the world requires so much work, so much striving, so much struggle, so much adjusting and re-adjusting to do things that make sense to others, things that are recognized by others.
I do think that "total eclipses" are moments that shape the directions of our lives, but I think these moments extend beyond the kinds of moments we usually think about as doing so. Some total eclipses are moments that seem insignificant and subsequently blind us because they turn out not to be. Some total eclipses happen when we don't go looking for them on hillsides in Washington.
