‘I’m going to call you Gouda from now on’, said my sister soon after the wig lady had shaved my head bald. ‘Why’s that?’, I asked her surprised. ‘Gouda Hole-y Cheese’, she said while pointing at the bald spots on my head. I burst out laughing - the tone was set for that afternoon. When I sat in front of the mirror with my freshly bald head to try on my first wig, the wig specialist had me try on a platinum blonde piece. ‘With this hair, you can go to Red Light District and quickly earn your money back’, she said. Hilarious!
It might be because my sisters and I used to get injured quite often. All three of us played hockey at a high level, and one of us would always end up with torn ankle and cruciate ligaments. That obviously sucked, but if we’d let that feeling linger, the three of us would now be really depressed and in a health institute. In order to keep our spirits high, we would often tease each other about stuff, including our misery. No joke was too blunt for us.
When I started losing my locks of hair, I obviously thought it was not something to laugh about. It did help enormously, though, that my sisters didn’t treat me any differently and instead just kept on making blunt jokes. Knee, ankles, hair - what difference does it make? I will admit, at first I laughed a little bit too hard at my own jokes. But it did help. If you’re just going to mope around all day and just focus on what you’ve lost, there’s no fun in that, right?
‘It helped enormously that my sisters didn’t treat me any differently, and instead just continued making blunt jokes’
As you can see, we laugh a lot in my family, but for other people, our sense of humour takes some getting used to. So one time, I got very excited on my mom’s new electric bike. Such a cool machine! At 28 km/h, I raced past fields and ditches, until my wig flew off. I’d got it from a really lovely woman who had healed from cancer, but it was a little bit too big. Not an issue for daily tasks, but apparently it doesn’t go well with high speed ? When I stumbled off the bike to pick up my wig, I saw a man cycling behind me. In shock, he got off his bike: were those tears on my cheeks due to crying or laughing? It was only when he saw that I was almost pissing myself from laughing that he dared to join in. The two of us stood there howling for another fifteen minutes. But I will still make sure that my hair is nice and secure if I get on an electric bike again. Not for me, but for the people behind me. Don’t want to give anyone an actual heart attack.
