The blessing of laughter

My friends and the bride

I don’t even remember what was so funny the first time it happened, but it happened countless times over the course of a long weekend celebrating a friend’s daughter’s wedding.

The laughter.

We laughed until we cried.

Really big tears. The kind that needed a man-sized handkerchief.

And not just once.

Probably dozens of times.

I hadn’t felt so good in ages!

I have a crowd of five girlfriends who came together 30 years ago in Washington, D.C. as young professionals, young marrieds, young parents. Our families formed a supper club connected by the shared experiences of growing up in the south, attending SEC colleges, and (for the most part) working in politics.

At the time, we thought of the supper club as just a fun way for some southern ex-pats in D.C. to come together over food, football and kids. Little did we know we were starting to set the table for a lifelong friendship.

Just so you get the picture … this supper club didn’t require fancy meals, the good china or even a clean house. Our supper club focused on simplicity.

But the big thing I remember about the supper club wasn’t the food.

It’s how we laughed.

We laughed playing board games. We laughed over the meals that didn’t turn out exactly as our moms would have made them. We laughed while helping each other move from one small condo to another or paint the walls of a new house. We laughed over our bold attempt at throwing our first “grown up” cocktail party using all that silver and china that good southern girls got for wedding gifts. We laughed while sharing holiday meals far away from our families back home.

Eventually, the realities of D.C. life kicked in, and four of the five families moved back south. Among us since our years in D.C., we have lived in eight cities, had 12 children now ranging from 14 to 31, experienced parents’ deaths, lived through a tornado, weathered illnesses and changed jobs more times than I can count.

Girls’ weekend 1999

Today, two of us are in Columbia, one each in Florida, Mississippi and Connecticut. We’ve stayed in touch through the years with girls’ weekends, texts, emails, Facebook, Christmas cards and random overlaps during trips that took us to each others’ current hometowns.

I don’t know if this friendship would have weathered these 30 years if we had all stayed in D.C. We might have ended up living in distant suburban neighborhoods. Kids probably would have gone to different schools. Budding careers could have forced our priorities to change. Time together may have fallen by the wayside.

Maybe it’s the fact that we don’t all live in the same city that has kept this friendship alive. And I am so thankful for that.

As I reflected on the laughter hangover I had for several days after that weekend, I realized those couple of days fell at the intersection of three things that are basic to a happy life – laughter, joy and friendship. We had all three in great abundance for that weekend.

But the question came to my mind: Why was it so easy, when we don’t communicate regularly as a group, to fall into that kind of soul cleansing laughter time after time over the weekend?

First, we were gathered for such a joyful occasion – the first wedding among the children of our supper club group. At the bridesmaid lunch, we seemed to have caused a spectacle with several of the bridesmaids videoing one of our laughing bursts. I’m sure we sounded like a combination of yelping dogs and snorting pigs, but we were oblivious. It happened again in a store, then at lunch the next day. We broke out in laughs numerous times during the wedding reception.

Second, I believe as we’ve aged, we’ve become far less conscious of what others think - both among our little group and in our wider worlds. We’ve all had our own versions of successes and failures. Age has gently nudged us with the gift of being able to say exactly what we are thinking and allows us to be ourselves …  but more importantly, to laugh at ourselves.

That reminded me of a quote from one of my favorite writers, Brene Brown, who described laugher in this way in The Gifts of Imperfection: “Laughter is a spiritual form of communing; without words we can say to one another ‘I’m with you, I get it’ … knowing laughter embodies the relief and connection we experience when we realize the power of sharing our stories - we’re not laughing at each other but with each other.”

Then a couple of days later, I was reading an interview with another of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, and she mentioned a quote from one of her earlier books, Plan B.

“Laughter is like carbonated holiness,” she wrote.

Yep. That was the perfect way to describe this intersection of laughter, joy and friendship we experienced. Our laughter was carbonated holiness connecting us that weekend ... the blessing of holiness amped up by the bubbly, tingly, fizzy carbonation of laughter.

At the wedding reception that weekend, I watched all the young folks who had come from far away to celebrate the marriage of their friends. They probably haven’t considered the possibility that these friendships could fall away as they age, move, have kids.

My wish for the young people … particularly the young women gathered for this happy wedding … is they would be blessed by this same kind of friendship I’ve found with these four friends. 
 

You don't have to see each other, talk or text every day. But you can pick up exactly where you left off last time ... in the middle of the best-ever belly laughs that bless us with giddy, giggling carbonated holiness.