Flabbergasted

October 7, 2021

My mother-in-law didn't know that she was about to become an entry in the book of Ross Family Legends when she was doubled over laughing on the streets of Lower Manhattan; she was merely surrendering to the joy of my husband trying to use big words and almost getting them right. To be clear: He wasn't my husband at the time: He was about 6, and his mom had been teaching him vocabulary, so David thought he'd try one in conversation.

"Look," he said, pointing to a nearby skyscraper. "It's being flabbergasted!"

David said to me decades later that watching his normally-dignified mother helpless in the grip of a public giggle fit was a new and delightful experience, and he remembers being pleased to have been the cause of it. "Flabbergasted..." she said, between gasps, "Oh, David, that's wonderful... no, it's being sandblasted!"

The story was told to me when David and I first got together. It had a simple moral: Life is better when you're laughing (with pleasure, of course, not with derision). When I saw how formative this incident was for him, I decided I'd be that way, too, when I became a mother: If I couldn't help but laugh, I wouldn't help but laugh, dignity be damned.

This has worked out great for raising kids: You'll often hear "Uh-oh, we've lost Mom again" in my family after some witticism takes me by surprise. Then everyone starts laughing at ME, and even the most cynical teenager can't be grumpy when her mother is laughing too hard to swallow the sip she has just taken. The down side is that it means I never developed good giggle control, so it's an occasional liability, for example if I'm sitting in a concert hall with 500 silent people listening to the serious part of Handel's Messiah. (This actually happened. Highly embarrassing, but a good story!)

It's never too late to decide you're going to be someone who relaxes into the joyful contagion of unrestrained laughter. You might be surprised how good it is for the soul, and for the people around you. Possibly even flabbergasted.

—Deb