All the tears
My little girl is a crier. Tears flow when she is frustrated, angry, hurt, confused, and most definitely just tired. She can’t find her dolly at bedtime and she cries. She can’t pull the blanket up high enough under her chin and she cries. I doubt the truthfulness in something she says, and she cries. Usually, the crying accomplishes what it is probably meant to do: back me down, increase my empathy and patience and compel me to find a different way to meet her needs.
But the other night her tears and moaning only provoked me. Having been woken for the second time, I lost all patience and compassion and just tried to make her stop. And when she wouldn’t, the worst possible thought went through my head, “You ugly girl, stop making that horrible face.” Guilt and shame flooded in immediately, and my thought kept me awake for at least another hour after she was tucked warmly back in her bed and fast asleep.
I hated myself for actually thinking that. It’s not just that the thought surfaced, it’s that I somehow held that thought deep inside of me. My rational self knew it wan’t true: I think my daughter is insanely beautiful inside and out, and I have those thoughts dozens of times every day. So where was that horrible idea hiding? Was it my own issues with showing weakness? Just sheer exhaustion? Anger at my husband for making me deal with the night waking? A flashback to the embarrassment I felt when my mom cried when I was a child?
Let me step back here. My mom is a crier. She cried at nearly every important event—joyful or sad. Mostly I remember being confused and embarrassed when she cried at church. It was usually during a song we were singing. What was it that provoked her tears? Music is her haven, so was it a feeling of belonging—or isolation? I just remember looking up from my songbook to see her face: red, tear-streaked, lips pursed as she tried to hold back the inevitable.
As a child, I think I veered away from my mother’s level of outward emotions and chose what I believed was strength. I rarely cried when I was young. Not even at funerals. Perhaps it was inevitable that my stoicism wouldn’t last. Over the years I became more and more of a crier. Like mother, like daughter. Sometimes even the small things set me off more than the big ones. (Living outside of the US, I have always felt bad that I don’t cry when saying goodbye to my best friend or family when I leave the States…only later to lose it completely on the plane.)
Last year I read an article by Marisa Meltzer in Elle that stuck with me. Meltzer sites Jay Efran, PhD, an emeritus professor of psychology at Temple University. He says, “We think we cry when something causes tension or arousal, such as a confrontation. But that's not when the crying occurs...It occurs when there's a switch over to recovering, letting go, and recalibrating." When I read this, not only was I fascinated but relieved—and a bit more forgiving of my mother’s tears. Meltzer also quotes Doot Ad Vingerhoets, who wrote Why Only Humans Weep: Unravelling the Mysteries of Tears. In his introduction he says crying isn’t merely a symptom of sadness. It is a “very complex behavior that is under the influence of biological, psychological, and sociocultural forces.” He also states that crying changes depending on the context and age.
Putting crying into some sort of frame still doesn’t solve the issue of my horrible thought. But perhaps it sheds some light. Maybe I haven’t entirely given myself permission to express sadness, exhaustion, frustration or fear in its rawest form. Maybe I’m still only seeing tears as a symptom of something else—not a behavior that needs to be acknowledged.
I’m reading more about emotional coaching and social-emotional intelligence in parenting. This opens a whole other box that I’m not informed enough to discuss, but I’ve learned enough to know it presents an opportunity to embrace my child and recognize the real-ness of such big emotions flooding into such a little being.
I also recently read Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy. I dog-eared a page because it spoke so loudly to me. Grealy describes how her mother continually tried to soothe her by telling her not to cry, that there was nothing to be afraid of. She writes, “My mother didn’t know how to conquer what I was afraid of, nor could she even begin to tell me how to do it myself. Instead, out of her own fear, she offered her own philosophy, which meant in this instance that I should conquer the fear by not crying.”
I’ve read and heard it said many times that all human emotions can be boiled down to two emotions: love or fear. If this is the case, it’s pretty clear my response to my daughter wasn’t one of love. Digging into what I was afraid of would require the help of my psychoanalyst. For now, I can move past that situation by acknowledging that my horrendous response was fear of some kind (and sheer exhaustion—and fear that this stage isn’t passing fast enough!). Next time, I should probably just give her a hug and smile. She becomes more like me every day. And my own mother, too.
