Isn’t it Ironic?

I read in the paper about a woman that was driving and saw an average, red, octagonal stop sign with a black spray-painted word written below the word “STOP”. The word was “GRAFFITTI”. She used the example to teach her 10 year old son about the concept of irony. Her article went on to talk about some irony in life.

I think we all experience irony in life. In fact, I have heard it said (as you probably have too) that most of what we worry about never actually happens. It’s those things that never occur to us that actually become our trials and difficulties in life. I have decided this is true, even if only in our perceptions. (which is a whole other post)

Why is it that some people that always dreamed of marriage and family, remain perpetually single? Why is it that women that wanted 10 children struggle with infertility? Why is it that some men bent on making 6 figures a year by 30 can’t seem to graduate from college?

Is everything ironic? Absolutely not. Things have worked out perfectly for me and you many times in life. We just don’t think about those things as much as the ironic ones.

But for me, my worries especially have a tendency to be ironic. Here are a bunch of examples.

• When we were engaged, my husband and I got in a discussion one day…. I thought that marriage was going to be the biggest change of my life. I was worried about the change from single-hood to married life. However, it wasn’t a big deal at all. We feel into married life naturally and easily. Ironically, I wasn’t that nervous about the change of having our first child. I thought it would be great when that change came. However, that was a WAY harder change than marriage was… by far.
• We were cut off from all our friends in a really weird ward split 2 years ago. I prayed at that time that I would feel liked and included in the new ward. Not much later, we began to have horrible problems with an immediate neighbor. These problems have gone on to personal, character attacks of my husband and I, death threats, threats of law suits, harassment, the list goes on and on. Our religious leaders have tried to help to no avail, and so our ward has only rallied around and felt sorry for our insane neighbors. Ironic that my foremost hope and prayer — to feel included — was answered by further problems, and people only caring and trying to help out the abuser, rather than the abused.
• Right now, my husband and I are really praying, carefully considering, mulling and worrying over a daughter of ours. We are trying to decide whether or not she should skip 2^nd grade next year and go straight from 1^st to 3^rd. We are weighing pros and cons, having slightly heated conversations about her missing junior prom someday, and trying to make the right decision for everyone involved. Ironically, of all my children, I got pregnant with her the easiest of them all. Because of that, I worried that it was too easy and something was going to be horribly wrong with her. I had times during my pregnancy that I was almost convinced that she was going to be handicapped, or mentally deficient in some way. I don’t know why. But last week, I was driving home one day thinking about what to do about our daughter skipping 2^nd grade and had a sudden flashback to being pregnant with that same child and worried sick that she was going to be truly handicapped. Yet she is brilliant. Funny. What a waste of energy that was.

Well, there is more, but this post is getting too long… What ironies have you had in life? We all have them. For W.E. , it’s working in a cubicle, worried about eyestrain and carpal tunnel, when he thought he’d be at the theater. What are yours? We may laugh about them now. We may want to cry just thinking about them. But we have weird, ironic things in life. Do tell…..