What I hope they will remember

The women in my family all have the same laugh – or cackle, depending on your point of view, or tolerance for joy.

I have an infinite tolerance for joy.

It starts like a spark. Catches on like wildfire. One by one, we ignite in a noisy cacophony.

When I was a kid, my grandma was usually the one who started it. The laugh would begin in her belly and then explode into to a shriek. It would roll across the dining room table as each of the women in my family would capture a note and build atop it, summoning others from throughout the house to come running to the call of hilarity. By then we would be a multigenerational orchestra of hyenas.

Usually, the object of laughter was barely funny at all, but it didn’t matter. The men and the boys didn't always understand what we were laughing about, or how we even contained the notes that escaped from our collective hearts – let alone sung them in such a symphony, but they would shake their heads and love us for it. That love and appreciation was and is genetic too.

Our cackle is our calling card. The kind of mouth-agape ugly laugh that is as far removed from a ladylike giggle as possible. Emily Post would not approve.

I have few regrets when it comes to raising my children, but one clear one is that they don’t know this sound. They may “remember” it in the way you remember a funny thing that happened to you when you were two because your mother told you the story over and over again. Or the way you vividly recall your 2nd grade school play because of a yellowed picture you’ve seen in an album (mine was something to do with an ostrich, and my mom handmade an epic ostrich costume from feathers sewn into an oversized white hoodie).

This sound that I store in my heart, that I can hear bellowing through my soul, that is so integral to who we are as a familial matriarchy. It is like a legend for them that they never knew.

There’s many traits I hope to pass on to my kids – both my daughter and my sons – that flowed through the women in our family.

* Our habit of convening in hospital waiting rooms, which parenthetically are a fantastic echo chamber for laughter – though not always appreciated by the other families.

* Our deeply held opinions on a wide range of minutiae (my Aunt Shirlee knew the exact stain removal technique when your boyfriend, who you’re not actually sure you even like anymore, explodes a pen all over your brand new comforter. She also was the first to tell me it was time to extract said boyfriend btw).

* Our collective medical degree. If you are a woman in my family, you are a doctor. No actual medical school classes required.

* Our independence. The women in my family work. The notion that I would go to college to get an MRS degree or be someone’s arm candy was just non existent. I was raised to have big dreams without boundaries and told I had everything it took to make it happen.

* We are survivors, we are anchors, we are resilient.

* We are feral in the way we protect our children.

But that laugh. God how I wish I’d recorded it. If I could pass that laugh onto my kids, I would know I’d succeeded as a parent.

I wish I’d captured so many things. But how do you bottle up a feeling? How do you grab a sound and all of its context of love and connection and belonging and values? If you even had recorded that sound, would it contain multitudes in this dimension?

I hear it. I can summon it from my heart and feel not just the sound but the memories, the connections, the love.

Will my kids feel that in some way? Do they know? I’m not sure.

Lost in the to-do lists of motherhood and the worries about bandaging the cuts both visible and not, is this — the fact that the salve that heals someone over their life are these things. The bits you can’t package. The bits you can’t wrap up with a bow.

The memories they will have when they too are 48 years old