My mother was diagnosed with brain cancer almost four months ago.
It was a Saturday.
Ever since I’ve been able to think my own thoughts I’ve disliked Saturdays. There is something about all the people doing things out in the world all at the same time–running all the same errands, sitting in traffic, waiting in line at the store, walking slow…it just kind of spins me around in the wrong way.
That Saturday wasn’t much different. However, instead of waking up to pancakes I woke up to papers scattered all over the place and my mother’s hair sticking straight up. Shortly thereafter we wandered to the apple orchard, again with all the other humans, in pursuit of the perfect Instagram picture. As Taylor and I attempted to get the perfect selfie our mother started shaking and began to be unable to walk.
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The ER is another place that I dislike on Saturdays. It’s full of humans who have hoped they could wait until Monday to see their primary care doctors, bozos playing with fireworks or turkey fryers, and the kids who flipped over their scooter playing with their friends.
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Edie and Thea: A Very Long Engagement, tells the story of Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer, whose DOMA court case would become a national landmark case for the rights of LGBT people and their families. Windsor and Spyer, who became young adults in the 70s and 80s, long struggled as to how to live their lives in a way that was both open and consciously aware of safety at a time when the public fear of LGBT people was high due to the AIDS crisis. A few years into their relationship, Spyer developed progressive MS, a disease that would slowly cause her to lose all her muscle tone and eventually cause her body to shut down. Faced with what could have been a crisis, Windsor and Spyer adopted a new phrase: “don’t postpone joy.”
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Faced with a long battle full of Saturdays I figured pretty early on it was in my best interest to learn to like them because, well, that’s 52 days a year I don’t like. In a lifetime, that’s a lot of days. Not liking Saturdays was truly postponing joy. It was saying, “well, Saturday, you are no good to me and so I’ll just try to skip over you every week and go through the motions.”
The first Saturday after choosing to like them I walked into the new hot yoga studio in town and took a class. As I was walking out, the owner asked me if I was a teacher. I said that I was and he offered me a job teaching the 4:15 PM class on, you guessed it, Saturdays. I think the universe supported my decision to open up to the possibility of something greater than myself taking the space of dislike of a day.
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And, here in the Gettman house, we’ve stopped postponing joy. We’ve had a stellar holiday season full of matching outfits, pink hair, Scandal marathons, Sushi for breakfast, frolicking deep in the muddy woods, and learning to love Saturdays.
