Every parent knows what it is.
It’s the socks thrown everywhere outside, planted like little stinky land mines across the entire yard. Their discovery fills me with rage, and I want to chuck each one into the garbage with so much fiery, exploding dad wrath that every kid will see the smoldering craters of sock ashes and marvel at my fury, not daring to leave any bit of clothing outside EVER AGAIN. But sometimes, where the stupid socks are sitting is so stupidly inexplicable – inside the barbecue grill or on the little tips of all the pine branches exactly three feet off the ground – the stink bombs win, and I spare their dumb sock lives so they can go through the laundry and end up right back in the dirt tomorrow.
Sometimes it’s the reheated macaroni and cheese that I eat for lunch because I’m just not fighting with the seven-year-old food tyrant today. It’s the cheap kind from the box (obviously) and I don’t mean the nice box with actual commercials. I mean the store brand I get three for a dollar during case-lot sales. There’s, like, ninety-six of those in my pantry right now because it’s one of seriously three things the kid will eat. I mix it with a little milk after microwaving to pretend it’s fresh, and – no lie – it’s embarrassingly adequate.
Or maybe it’s the perfume of softly aged potty, now permanently ineradicable from my youngest son’s bedroom. I peek in at night, while he’s sleeping like an innocent, angel Spinosaurus, and somehow that yuck is heavenly sweet in my nostrils.
These everyday lamenesses suddenly – without anything changing – have a way of smacking me with baffling delight. The pleasure hits without warning, and there’s no use trying to figure out how.
Right now, outside my bedroom window in the raw, late-winter night, a star is tugging at my attention. The tiny spark is flickering nearly so furiously that the windowpanes rattle around it. My sleepy eyes have split it into an unfocused identical pair, and the twins are performing a wild disco: cyan/white/fuchsia/green/white/gold/red/blue/white/yellow at insane speed. It’s spectacular, and it’s merely an eensie star, up there just for me to look at. I might be the only one admiring its astonishing act. It keeps calling me. It’s wrecking my writing and sucking away all my sleep, but it’s an awesome little thing, and I adore it.
I get hit like this a lot. I have a lot of kids. Six right now. Well, seven, actually, but technically one is in my foster care. I’m not her real dad, as she constantly reminds me, and I’m ashamed that it’s not going very well with her. I’m heartbroken, in fact, and I’m frustrated, and it stresses me out, so I’m not going to talk about that part of my life tonight. Tonight I just want to talk about joy.
Joy is a fundamental experience.
It’s not the same as happiness. Definitely, it’s not what pleasure is. Joy is the thing that’s deeper and steadier and that doesn’t really move in or out very easily. It’s what holds everything up when it’s there and what pulls everything apart when it leaves.
Joy gets tangled into all our everyday stuff, so it can look like a bunch of different emotions on the surface, depending on what’s floating nearby.
Joy sits with us. It walks beside us. It sleeps with us and eats with us and showers and works with us. It sweats and cries and gasps and cheers and maybe argues with us – if we have it.
Joy isn’t just what remains when sorrow goes away. Joy is strong enough to abide through everything. If it comes and goes, that’s not joy. That’s something shallower.
In a different post, sometime I’ll talk about losing my unborn son and how I learned that joy can be devastatingly painful. Or maybe I’ll say it this way: I know that even devastating pain can be joy.
So how does it work that intense satisfaction can pop out of the stupid, mundane things that I normally hardly notice? What are the fissures in my everyday life that allow happiness to sometimes suddenly gush out, and why don’t they always flow like this?
It’s unexplainable.