Dispatches from Babyville: The Persistence of Delight

I wanted to write a funny essay about parenting during the pandemic. 

I discovered that I can’t write a funny essay about parenting during the pandemic. 

None of this is funny.  The loss, the suffering, the fear, the isolation, the rage – there is no small part of any of that that’s funny. 

But it’s more than that. 

It’s that the ubiquitous bleakness the pandemic has wrought has seemed to rob other things of their humor, too. I can’t help feeling sometimes like a prisoner in Azkaban, with the dementor of Covid sucking all the humor out of the world. 

It’s not to say that I haven’t laughed in months. I have. There have been things I’ve recognized as entertaining – but those laughing-so-hard-you’re-crying guffaws, the laughter that leaves you breathless and sighing and shaking your head. the kind of laughs that restore you – those have gone missing for me. 

I know that funny’s not gone. Funny’s just on a long vacation somewhere. Maybe Iceland. I hear they’ve got their virus numbers under control. 

For better or worse, I’m an optimist. I know funny will be back. 

In the meantime, I’ve found delight. 

I am not a philosopher. I am not a poet. Hell, I don’t even meditate. I am not qualified to wax rhapsodic on the relationship between pain and delight. So I won’t. 

I’ll just say that accidentally stumbling across small, unexpected moments of delight has sustained me during these months. It’s gotten me through. When Humor couldn’t cope, Delight stepped up to take her place. 

A year ago, I read an excerpt of Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, in which he masterfully chronicles a delight every day for a year. The part I read was about him taking a tiny tomato plant on an airplane with him. He describes the way other passengers and flight attendants are disarmed and charmed to see someone carefully carrying a seedling like a baby, through the airport and onto the plane. The plant brought other people delight and their delight brought Gay some, too. 

For a long time, I’ve tried to make gratitude a habit, and to develop this practice in my kids. I have largely failed. All the “Gratitude Journals” I bought remain blank, and while my children go through the motions naming something they are grateful for at meals, one gets the feeling their heart isn’t in it. If I’m being honest, the concept of gratitude, while appealing to me, has never been accessible. I never feel like I’m doing it right.

Delight, on the other hand, is easy. It’s so small. It’s everywhere. 

And – here’s the key part – I don’t have to go looking for it. It finds me. Even during times of relentless darkness. Especially during those times.

Delight is when you’re taking a walk in nature because everyone agrees that’s restorative, despite the fact that you find nature pretty boring and a little scary — and all of a sudden, you see a baby bunny in the wild. It’s a little brown baby bunny hopping around like they do on TV, and he lets you get so close you could practically touch him. 

Delight is a teenager riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, one-handed because the other hand is clutching an old-school boom box, and on his head, perfectly balanced, is a basketball. 

Delight is the shockingly, stunningly yellow patch of Black Eyed Susans on 9^th Street. 

Delight is the look on your eight-year-old’s face when, from all the way down the street, she sees a mini goldendoodle puppy approaching, and she knows that even though everything else ever invented has been cancelled, there is about to be some serious puppy petting, and it is imminent and it is everything. 

Delight is thinking you are out of string cheese when you  are particularly hungry one night at 1am, which is the new 11pm. You go to the fridge in a Hail Mary pass, because while 2020 has nearly killed the optimist in you, there’s a weak pulse of positivity still beating, and it doesn’t hurt to check. Lo and behold, hidden under the American Cheese slices and the moldy goat cheese, there is one string cheese left. And it is all for you. 

Delight is sitting on someone else’s stoop with your 13-year-old daughter, six feet away from passers-by, drinking cold bubble tea on a scorching day. You are sitting near the corner, and a car stops at the light, directly in front of you. “Shake Senora” is blasting from the car, which comes as a surprise because that’s not a song you can imagine anyone listening to of their own volition, but somehow, you and your daughter find you cannot help but bop your head along to the music. The driver of the car, head also bopping, notices you, and calls out a greeting and then the three of you head-dance together as you wait for the light to change.

Delight is when you are standing in the middle of your kitchen, first thing in the morning, already exhausted, and all three of your children are complaining because they want opposite things which seems like it’s impossible because a thing can only have one pair of opposites and yet, somehow, here you are. You are trying to drink a cup of coffee and not think about how you will be stuck in the house with three disgruntled children for who-knows-how-long, no end in sight, and you shout to no one in particular, “I am going to have a nervous breakdown.” And your teenage son stops complaining for a moment, considers this, and inquires, “Well, can it be prevented?” and you put your coffee cup down and laugh, because even though it’s not funny, it’s a thing to laugh at, and probably what it can best be described as is a delight. 

For so many reasons, for so many people, it’s a hard, hard time. And, too, there are these tiny moments of delight. I hope some flutter past you. I hope some alight on your window.