Crybaby for Life

How I learned to stop worrying and love my tears.

Street art in Coimbra, Portugal via Wikimedia Commons.

What set me off always seemed minor to others: a less-than-perfect test score, a taunt from a classmate, a poor showing at kickball. But the result was always the same. Tears, and lots of them. They were a well-worn accessory, as much a part of my childhood identity as my height (short), hairstyle (permed) and disposition (intense). When I was growing up, my parents and teachers called me sensitive, but peers had a less generous, name: Crybaby.

I always hoped I’d outgrow my crybaby status, but as the years progressed, it looked less and less likely. I broke down in a junior high math class, my high school vice principal’s office, a college French seminar. Even criminal law in law school (note: crying in itself is not a crime). I’ve cried while fighting with lovers and friends, getting lost in foreign cities, cooking mishaps. See also: fender benders, missed trains, phone calls with Time Warner cable.

By the time I was in my mid-40s, I had mostly settled into being a crybaby and all that came with it. I described myself to others as emotional, sensitive, or labile, a word that my father, a doctor, sometimes used to describe my crying jags. Fellow crier and writer Maureen Stanton notes in her Longreads essay, “Through A Glass, Tearfully,” that this “word for weepiness contains shame.” It comes from the word “liable” in Late Middle English and “to fall” in Latin. I can attest that I felt a lot of shame about my crying and often apologized for my tears. Sometimes I considered introducing myself that way, as if I were attending a 12-step program for criers. “Hi, I’m Alyson, and I’m a crybaby.” Or maybe I could just buy a custom-made bumper sticker: Crybaby for Life.

I made big decisions based on this defining characteristic. When I became a lawyer in my 20s, I avoided any specialty that would require public speaking. If there was no crying in baseball, as Tom Hanks’ character espoused in the movie A League Of Their Own, surely there was no crying in the courtroom.

By my late 30s, I thought I knew everything there was to know about crying. Then I had my son. He seemed to cry a lot, even for a newborn. This was confirmed when I read a parenting book that told me, based on the number of hours that my baby was awake and crying, that he was “fussy.”

My wife and I tried a rotation of fancy, hand-me-down rockers that promised to soothe babies, and yet my son rejected each and every one. We held him like a football, as one popular pediatrician advertised. We sang. We were silent. We hummed. We employed dance moves more embarrassing than Elaine Benes’ from Seinfeld. We wrapped him in a piece of cloth and tied it to our bodies. All to no avail.

As I struggled to understand my own crying, now I also struggled to understand my son’s. Dr. Bill Sears, whom I’ve only ever encountered online, wrote an article explaining that crying was how my baby could communicate with me. Over time, he said I would be able to decipher these cries. With enough listening, I would know whether my baby was hungry, or needed a diaper change, or if he simply wanted me to rotate the mobile above his head to see the monkey instead of the elephant.

Despite Dr. Sears’ insistence that I was “biologically programmed” to understand my baby’s cries, my son’s tears wore me down. When the baby cried, I cried. When I cried, the baby cried. We became a two-headed crying machine. I not only feared for my sanity in those moments, but also for my son’s future. Would he be a crybaby, too? I seriously hoped not.

My mother blamed herself for my crying, but more nurture than nature. She told me she let me win too many games when I was a kid. In her mind, this left me unprepared for disappointment later in life, and so I turned to tears. To me, this was always a dubious explanation. A few more losses in Chutes and Ladders and my tear ducts would’ve dried up? A therapist would later point to factors in my childhood as the culprit. My mother and brother both faced life-threatening illnesses when I was growing up, and the therapist posited that the tears might have been a coping mechanism to deal with the stress.

At age 30, there was a brief moment when I thought I’d found a medical explanation for my lifelong condition. An optometrist in Brooklyn proposed that I might have a blocked tear duct, something which could be repaired. As I walked back to my apartment, the wind coaxing tears from my defective duct, I was overjoyed at the thought that a surgical procedure could correct this. Correct me. Imagine who I could be if I cried less. Maybe I would go back to a legal specialty with more conflict, or just take simple joy in the fact that nobody had to know when I was feeling my worst.

Of course, it wasn’t so simple. Google told me that we actually make three kinds of tears, and the emotional ones didn’t come from the same place as the tears the optometrist was referring to. So much for relying on the optometrist to solve your biggest life problems.

My son became a toddler, and while his crying lessened, his emotional outbursts didn’t. We were told these were not uncommon for a child of his age, but at around age five, we started getting calls from the teachers. His behavior was disruptive to others in the class; at times, they worried about his safety.

These discussions made me wonder what the teachers had told my parents about my behavior, if anything. My mother is no longer alive to ask, and my father doesn’t remember. All I can recall is that some teachers comforted me, while others ignored me. I have to imagine that my son’s behavior got more attention because his affected others in ways that mine didn’t.

Unwilling to trust any more parenting decisions to the internet, I decided to take my son to a therapist who engaged in play therapy. One day, when the therapist and I were catching up by phone, she explained that my son didn’t yet have the words to describe what he was feeling and that’s what likely caused the disruptive behavior. The goal of the therapy was to build confidence so that he could eventually use his words, rather than his body, to explain his emotions.

I remember being told to fight back against my tears as if they were an enemy to be vanquished. The tools I was offered were deep breaths, warm water rinses, and reminders to “relax” and “calm down.” In other words, I didn’t stand a chance. Instead of fighting my tears, I learned to become comfortable crying in front of other people. Once, in a law firm partner’s office, I cried while taking extensive feedback on a contract I’d drafted, alternating between asking him questions and apologizing for my tears.

Watching my son’s behavior at home, I noticed that his trigger points weren’t all that different from mine. He would lose it when he was misunderstood; for example, if I didn’t hear him clearly the first time and asked him to repeat himself. Sometimes he would get upset when he was being criticized, or asked to do something he didn’t want to do in that moment.

One day, I urged him to relax when he became distraught over a poor showing at mini-golf. He wanted to move on to the next hole, but I told him he had to calm down first. Through tears, he insisted that I let him play. In return, I insisted he hand over his club. We went back and forth like this for a while, until we were both too exhausted to fight. Later, he said that when I told him to relax, it upset him even more. “I don’t want to stop what I’m doing because I’m crying. I just want to go through it.”

I might have forgotten his words, but then something happened to me on a conference call for work. We’d been discussing a project where I had a big role, and someone made an assumption about why I approached it in a certain way. To me, it sounded like criticism, and before I could interject, another person piled on with their two cents.

I could feel my skin grow hot and I wanted to speak, but I couldn’t find a way in. Another well-meaning colleague suggested that I do something differently, and the team debated this course of action as I still struggled to speak. I could feel that familiar lump form in my throat that precedes my tears.

Normally, at this point, I would cry silently on the phone and pray for the call to end quickly. If asked questions by my colleagues, I might offer a one- or two-word response. But this time, something different happened. A voice emerged from somewhere within me. Inspired by my son, maybe? Rather than retreat inward, as I usually did, I heard myself talking in a tone that I might describe as grating or shrieky. I was not at my calmest or most articulate, but people seemed to get what I was saying. Later, someone agreed with how I handled things. The lump in my throat receded.

After we hung up, I couldn’t believe it. My mid-40s was the first time I’d ever successfully pulled myself back from tears. All those years of trying to calm myself down, and all it required was for me to speak up in the moment. Go through it, as my son said. Not calm down.

Maybe this strategy wouldn’t always work, but it got me thinking more deeply about my relationship to my tears. For most of my life, I’d looked at my crying as a personal failure. I was always trying to figure out what was wrong with me so I could cry less.

From an early age I learned that “boys don’t cry,” and neither should women if we wanted to be taken seriously. When I entered the workforce, the common wisdom was that tears were not a good look. I took all of this messaging to heart, concluding that my bountiful tears meant something was wrong with me. But now I understood that my tears weren’t the problem; the way they were perceived was.

My son’s therapist and teachers didn’t judge his emotional outbursts, and they certainly didn’t talk about them as an identity. Nobody labeled him Fusspot or Classroom Kicker or Kid with Uncontrollable Body Movements. Everyone believed that his behavior was something that he could eventually gain control over.

They also described it as a good thing. If he could learn how to listen to his body, it could help guide him to more productive next steps. This lesson seems obvious, but more often than not people are punished for expressing emotion rather than praised, especially women.

I like to imagine if this were not the case. What if we all took the approach of my son’s therapist and looked at our emotions, even negative ones, with curiosity? And what if we extended this curiosity to others, as well? Research shows that suppressing emotions is bad for our health, relationships and workplaces. And yet, I think most of us are still reticent to be vulnerable in this way. I wonder how much deeper our relationships might be if we gave each other the space to not only have our feelings, but also talk about them.

Many years ago, at a high school reunion, I reconnected with a guy I’d known from elementary school. After chatting for some time, he told me how nice it was to get to know me. “You’re so fun,” he said. “Like an entirely different person from who you were as a kid.” When I asked him to clarify, he seemed embarrassed for a minute, before admitting what he was thinking. “You cried a lot,” he said.

I bit my tongue, remembering that I once cried in response to him telling me that my spiral perm looked like a mop (in fairness, he wasn’t wrong). But aside from this, his words made me realize that he never saw me beyond my tears. At the time, I felt a little sorry for 11-year-old me, but now I see it as his loss, too. Neither of us had the words to talk about crying, and so my tears became a wall that made us know each other less, not more.

Understanding that my perception of my tears was shaped in large part by how others viewed them has changed me. My crying doesn’t define me the way it once did, and I no longer feel the need to introduce myself as a crybaby. Even when I cry, I’ve stopped apologizing as if I were committing a cardinal sin. Now, I just grab a tissue and move on.

Is there a way you always saw yourself but now realize was misguided? Have new therapeutic or parenting techniques taught you something about your own childhood?