boo hoo hoo

A post at Long Story Longer made me think of the first time I let loose and cried after a 13 year tear hiatus. It was early New Year's Eve, 1982. There was a year-in-review retrospective on television and it caught my eye. I was about three weeks sober and something about the Vietnam Memorial hit me and suddenly my eyes filled and then my cheeks were wet. Within a few seconds I was sobbing with that breathless gut level urgency that bespeaks tremendous pain or an unexpected escape from something dreadful.

LSL wrote ". . . I also cried like a schoolgirl with no lunch money. Actually, I think it would be called sobbing. I had to concentrate to not go into the loud cry." This was the loud cry: uncontrollable, the body's wet and wracking response to hurt that is, at least for the moment, unspeakable.

I quit crying at twelve, about two weeks after my mother vanished. It seemed I had spent those two weeks at the front window, listening, watching, expecting that she would return only to reach a point of certainty that she was never coming back and crying wouldn't make it happen. I gave it up. Tears reminded me of those hopeless two weeks at the window. This loud cry on New Year's Eve was 13 years of stuffed, wrapped, constricted, should-have-long-since-been-let-loose need to cry and it went on and on and on. The post-tears calm was notable in that I felt peaceful and free. Remarkable.

Over the next several years, the tears were like slow leaking springs in a rocky outcropping. I was a hard, hostile, angry young woman with tears in her eyes. My AA card players, those precious old men who "adopted" me when I first got sober, would smile when the tears would come, then one or the other would get up and come around the card table to hug me and rock me and make it okay. They couldn't make the hurt better, but they could make it okay to be a tough, rowdy, foul-tempered, profane child-woman with a tear streaked face.

In my mind, tears were evidence of weakness, of tenderness, of a soft inside that was vulnerable to hurt, and they accomplished nothing beyond letting others see my humanity. Exposing the soft center of me did not appeal. There was a crazy kind of strength ~ and an awful loneliness ~ in pretending to be invulnerable. But absent alcohol, absent excess food, absent all of those things I've used to manage life, there was no way to keep the wet inside. I leaked.

Once the well was emptied, I found a balance and now tears just come and go as I suspect they are supposed to. It's a shame that our society looks down on or makes light of tears expressed by men. Having had the advantage of crying freely for the last 24 years, I am saddened that the men I love have to struggle so with letting go in this way.

It seems that in my younger years my emotional life was constricted to a single point: anger. Rage, actually. As I got better, my range of emotions widened until I was capable of experiencing all of them. In the same way, the painful episodes of crying in my younger years have diminished and I've reached a point of being able to cry for all sorts of reasons.

Tears today come with hurt and sadness, of course, but also as the result of having a sense of peace, of spiritual connectedness, beauty, love and affection, tenderness. I think the best day I can have is one in which I laugh so hard I can hardly breathe, and also have the opportunity to cry just a little. I don't want to live a constricted life. I want a big, rich, full life brimming with every normal human experience and then some. Being the way I am, I want maximum emotion, maximum experience, I want the most there is, all the time, with great intensity. I think it's possible if I just let go.