Improv

When we got pregnant, the husband informed me that I needed to pick a “push present”. He did really call it that. He said that I, as the mom, needed to pick a gift for when the baby was born. Because apparently that’s a thing. 

Well, I thought about it for months. 

My husband is the type of guy that everybody, at the very least, likes. He can be the entertainer at any party. He was MC at one of my sister’s wedding. I’ve watched him make people cry, laughing so hard. He doesn’t get star struck, he can keep his composure, and when he’s in his element, he can, and often does, own the room. 

Knowing my husband and myself I asked for the only thing I could think of: I wanted him to go to an open mic night at a stand-up comedy club. At least for five minutes, just for me.

Well he thought about it for a long time and he tried to write some stuff down but nothing ever came of it and the only place that he could find five minutes of open mic, you needed to come in with a ridiculous number of people who are forced to buy two drinks. It became a whole thing that needed too much attention and work. And as brand new parents we just didn’t have the energy or real motivation to try and pull that off. 

I’m using the pronoun “we” because for the first year after the baby was born, anything we did was a joint effort. If the husband wanted to work on the garden it meant that either we both worked on it while the kid slept, or he needed to do it by himself. If I wanted to work on a crafting project, it meant that the husband needed to be full on with the kid. Every day was a coordinated effort just to make sure both of us had a minute to take a shower. 

So after some time, we realized that we just didn’t know that amount of people, the kid was too small to be left with a sitter, and the husband was too tired to think of jokes, so he just never did it. 

A while later, he told me that it just wasn’t in him to stand in front of a crowd like that and doing a stand up set wasn’t a “life goal” of his. Ok. I dropped the subject and moved on. 

Time passed and the kid is getting older. She’s more independent, and she needs me less and less. 

At the beginning of the year, we were looking for different classes for the kid to take and we attended an open house for a theater performance arts type of event. We found two things at this place: a little broadway type dance class for the kid and an improv class for me. 

I signed up that day and didn’t miss a class for ten weeks. I loved it! I got to spend one hour a week forcing myself to be in “the moment”, playing games, and talking in gibberish. I started again this semester and after a few classes I decided to sign up for the Fort Lauderdale Story Slam.

This is my push present to me. 

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Editor’s note: Thank you to my husband, who gives me the support, understanding and time to actually get this done. Also, he recorded it.