Life Together Apart: Embracing Absurdity

At the first of the year I read Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Learned to Love  by Kate Bowler. I downloaded it on a whim while I waiting for my next book to arrive in the mail and devoured it in a day. Everything in it rang so true to me. She is Catholic, or was Catholic maybe, but has a very similar faith background to me. She also has the exact same current world view as I do. Usually that isn't the case for me. If it's a Catholic writer I generally have a lot of issues with some of their views and then end up feeling conflicted and sad about how hard it is to love a faith that I grew up in so deeply, while still having so many major issues with the church as a whole. It's a conflict that has weighed on my soul for pushing twenty years at this point. It's conflict which I don't have a resolution to. However, this book was a breath of fresh hair to me, coming from someone with a similar combination of faith background and outlook on the world.

I started following Kate on social media and at the beginning of Lent she started posting daily videos talking about Lent. Shortly there after the world came crumbling down around us and the videos about Lent started to talk about how Lent related to these uncertain times. She posted short prayers to say each day during a time when I just couldn't even find words. All her posts gave me such great things to think about and pray about. Her guidance and content really helped me feel as more a part of lent as I have in years. It helped give me words to speak to my children about lent outside of the horribly depressing, we are all the worst people ever, sermons that are usually delivered in the Catholic church at Lent. This lent I was also unable to attend church so these videos and messages became a form of worship each morning. And it was lovely, a true blessing.

After Easter Kate started a website Life Together Apart where she will posts journal prompts, prayers, and videos for each day of the fifty days of Easter, trying to foster a sense of community, being together while living apart. The first day she talked about how we as a people need horizons. She is a survivor of cancer so she would live her life scan to scan while she was in treatment. She could try to live fully until that next scan. I fully understand this feeling as for years that's how I dealt with Zane's heart condition. I would be pretend to be blissfully unaware of his diagnosis until his next echo started to creep up on us, then it was a full fear spiral.

Now we all find ourselves in this place where there are no end dates for this terrible situation we are in. We need to form our own horizons, something to work towards. We need to make our own light along the way in this tunnel that seems to have no end. The fifty days of Easter is her way of forming  a horizon. Fifty more days. Who even knows where we'll be in fifty days. Maybe we'll be right here, in our houses, having spent months away from our loved ones and jobs. Maybe it will all be over and we can look back in amazement at all we went through. No one knows, but a horizon seemed like a great idea to me. So I joined this workshop/website/community and have been doing her daily prompts.

Which leads me to yesterday's prompt, embracing absurdity. I fully relate to this. I am the type of person who full bore will lean in to humor, ridiculousness, and absurdity during difficult times. I think of all the laughs in the waiting rooms during Zane's surgeries. Or singing rap songs with Able on the way to the funeral home to plan our father's funeral. You have to do whatever you can to find joy, even when it seems crazy. During this uncertain time, when all we have is time, endless time, why not use some of it for joy. This goes along with my quarantine motto of "why not" perfectly. I took this prompt yesterday and spent my day planning a Minute to Win it family competition for the end of the day.

While the boys did school work I made signs for each challenge, researched YouTube video instructions, and gathered supplies. This was our horizon for the day. This was something fun to look forward to, to work towards. Overall the whole activity took maybe thirty minutes. We picked teams and found matching t shirts. We took pictures and cheered. We had fun and forgot about all the craziness around us for a just a hot second. The competition ended in a tie so Zach and I did the keep the balloon in the air competition as a tie breaker.  I did this in socks on our new hardwood floors and nearly blew out my knee slip sliding around. A great time was had by all.

 Task number one:  Nose Dive - transfer as many cotton balls from one bowl to another using nothing but your nose with Vaseline on it. Zane won this one by a lot.

Task number two: Walk Hershey kisses on a spoon across the room and put them a cup. Rowan and I won this one by one. 

Task number three: Cheerio Noodle- Get as many cheerioes on a spaghetti noodle as possible in sixty seconds. Rowan won this one by a hair after he and Zane both had cheerios falling off in the last second.

 The Fourth Task: Johnny Apple Stacker - We had sixty seconds to stack five apples. Zach and I both failed this challenge.

 Task number five: Rise Up - Set up as many army men as you can in sixty seconds using only a clothes pin. This was a fun one that took a little practice. Zane won the first round with getting exactly one guy up. They both practiced a little and enjoyed trying to set them all up.

 Task Number Six: Defying gravity - Who can keep two balloons in the air the longest. Zane won this one with twenty seconds.

 Task number seven: Marshmallow Blow - Who can successfully blow a marshmallow across the table using a straw the fastest. Rowan won this one easily.

 Rowan and I in our matching Audra's Army shirts. There is a little girl at Zane's school named Audra who has been battling cancer the past few years. These are the shirts the kids wore on the days she had chemo treatments.

As much as we need horizons in the distance I have found that we also need very close horizons, shores if you were, that we can reach quickly. That we can get to by the end of the day and sometimes the end of an hour. This week I have started to make a short horizon in the middle of the day. I spend some amount of time in my room, in silence in the middle of the day. Sometimes it's twenty minutes. Sometimes, if everyone needs to nap, it's a hour. Sometimes it's five minutes in my closet in the dark. But my middle of the day horizon is silence. I have realized that the silence of nap time was grounding and helped me reset. I'm recreating it for myself, if even if it can only be in a small way.

In this same vein I have found the kids do better when we have an end of the day goal, or horizon to look forward to. This can very small like bathing in the big tub, or big like an elaborately planned Minute to Win it game. My brain personally can't plan things to far in advance right now. I can't focus at all. So I am not planning out events or goals days or weeks in advance. I am keeping this thought in the back of my mind and look for opportunities in the day to find something that could be a goal for the end of the day. Today Thatcher started playing with all the Cars cars this afternoon. Everyone enjoyed remembering those movies. So this evening we are going to watch Cars together. The end of the day goal is frequently a movie night, because as Glennon Doyle reminded us last week there is no TV time during quarantine All time is TV time, we are just trying to survive.

There are lots of ways to embrace absurdity in your life and I embrace every last one. Have dance parties, eat ice cream everyday if you have it, always pop the popcorn, drink Sonic drinks at 9 a.m., camp in the backyard, do whatever makes you happy, even if that happiness only last five or ten minutes. I am constantly trying to find a way to enjoy the slower pass, while still definitely missing all the fun things the crazy pace made possible in our lives. I'm trying not to think of all the money I flushed directly down the toilet planning and paying for fun things that we now cannot do and instead think of all the money I'm saving never driving my car, going to stores, or eating out. It is a constant struggle in my mind. I just keep going toward whatever the next goal or the next right thing is. I just keep going toward the horizons.