"Normal is only a setting on the dryer"

My wife went to the doctor a few weeks ago for a procedure. The nurse called the next day to check in.

“How’s she doing?” Asked Nurse Jackie
“You cut her. She’s sore.” (Nurse Jackie and I have a relationship based on direct honesty)
“To be expected. Any other side effects?”
“Is craving ice cream a side effect?” I wondered.
“No. But if anything weird is going to happen, it’s going to happen to her.”
“I wish I could tell you that is the first time I’ve heard that,” I relented.

“Normal is only a setting on the dryer” my bride declared proudly from the other room, overhearing my discussion with medicine’s finest. She’s right. For some reason, we all hope for normal or average. We want to know we’re not outside the bounds of everybody else. We like the predictability of it all. We want to know that if ‘x’ happens, then ‘y’ is sure to follow as it does in every other case. The reality is, as her doctor reminded us before the procedure, “this is medicine. Nothing is guaranteed.”

There are indeed patterns to this world and some of those patterns are more predictable than others. Maybe when we ask for ’normal,’ we ask for the most predictable pattern. We want to know that our behavior and our diseases and our children are unique just like everybody else.

The reality is that the range between extremes is all average, it’s just that some of it is more average than others. This is true of our kids’ grades, my emotional responses and the number of miles I can get out of a set of tires.

And yet the dryer calls this ’normal.'