Kirstie Alley: Surviving the awful

My husband was a nearly perfect boy, as his mother would gladly tell you. He never got into any trouble whatsoever. Well, there was that time he locked his sister in the dryer, or was it him that was locked in the dryer? Oh, well, at any rate that’s how those stories go. What was  at one time a troubling story evolves into a raucous tale that the family loves to tell over and over again.

Our children love it when I tell the story of how our son opened the car door and tumbled out into oncoming traffic when I was driving on a very busy four-lane road, but at the time it was the scariest thing ever.

Stephan was 3. We had been to a store to pick up some groceries and there was some toy he wanted that I wouldn’t buy. He was still pouting on the drive home. I was approaching a red light that was turning green at Portland’s 181st and Division Streets when Stephan announced that he was going to just walk home.

Since I have always been the sort of mother who doesn’t take to being threatened, I replied flippantly, “Okay.”

He opened the door just as I began the turn left. The force of the car turning flung him out into another frightfully busy lane of traffic. Since I was fully pregnant with twins at the time, I about lost my water. I slammed on the brakes and started screaming. I thought I was going to see my son get smashed like a grape under the wheels of some automobile.

Instead a man in the far lane hopped out of his truck ran across to where my son was, scooped him up and nearly threw him back into the car. I was so hysterical that I didn’t know what to do. The whole right side of Stephan’s face was bloodied from where he’s skidded across the asphalt face first.

Should I drive straight to the doctors? The hospital? Home? You know how faces bleed so profusely. I decided to go home first because we were only half-a-mile from the house. After I got the bleeding stopped, I could tell he didn’t need stitches. It was more like  really bad rug burn. Sorta. I was so thankful he wasn’t dead, I couldn’t yell at him, but I did give him instructions to never ever do that again.

“But I told you I was going to walk home,” Stephan replied in his defense.

He had a point.

But stories like this one are only amusing when told in retrospect over Easter dinner. Had Stephan died that day I would be telling you a completely different kind of story.

Much of life is like that — more amusing in hindsight than it is when we are in the muck of it.

I can laugh now at the time the police met me and a girlfriend at the house because it looked like someone had broken in while we were at youth group — and indeed they had. You should have seen the look on my brother’s face when he opened the door to see a a 300-pound  police officer on the other side with a flashlight drawn and a gun at his side. But at the time it was scary for Brother John,  for me and my girlfriend. (The officer looked a little scared, too, when Brother John showed up on the other side of the door of a dark house.)

And we all laugh, even though it’s really not all that funny, about the time our 3-year-old Ashley had to be medicated so doctors could do an MRI on her. She was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder that at the time was crippling her. Instead of the medication putting her to sleep as doctors had hoped, it only made Ashley high as a kite. As she was flailing about in her father’s arms at midnight (there was only one MRI machine in all of Oregon at the time so they ran it around the clock), she looked at me from her upside down viewpoint and declared, “I’m H-A-P-P-Y, Mama. Are you H-A-P-P-Y?”

Tim and I laughed then and have laughed numerous times over that moment over the years. It’s become a family saying: I’m happy, Ashley. Are you H-A-P-P-Y?

Within an hour of that moment, however, I was in the bathroom  crying and throwing up because the doctors had discovered a black mass in Ashley’s spine. Thank God and the angels who ministered health to her, Ashley’s fine today, though her disorder is something that will be a life-long issue.

I was thinking about all of these stories because of that fall Kirstie Alley took on Dancing with the Stars last night. Did you see it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o43045t313g&feature=player_embedded
It’s painful to watch, right? Makes a person dread the demeaning “dropping the fat girl” jokes that will surely follow.

But, just you wait, the day will come, maybe not soon, but down the road, when this stumble will be transformed into spontaneous laughter. It won’t be the kind of laughter that comes from demeaning another, but the pure, unadulterated sort of laughter that comes from having survived the awful.

Whether we are tumbling tail-over-head in a dryer or flying willfully headlong into danger, or stumbling awkwardly over one another, we need to trust that the day will come when all of these moments will be filtered through the lens of grace:  “He will fill your mouth with laughter and your lips with shouts of joy.” Job 8:21

Even the midst of the muck we can say to those around us:

I am H-A-P-P-Y.

Are you H-A-P-P-Y?