Yup. Still on holiday!
Following from last week’s awesome guest post from Tegan at Musings of the Misguided, I have the lovely Kathy from YinYang Mother.
Kathy was assigned to write based on the theme, “Tears” – a rather difficult and extremely sensitive topic, her story is both heartbreaking and inspiring.
Thank you so much Kathy for sharing your journey with us.
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So FYBF is brought to you today by a rather sad topic. Tears. I’m sorry. Please pass the tissues.
You’re sad that Grace isn’t here (off sunning herself in some exotic locale) and so you’re stuck with me, writing about sorrow. It’s a crying shame really.
Or is it? Ever cried with joy? Read on.
Like most people who’ve been lucky enough to make it through (more than) half the average lifespan, sometimes it feels like I’ve cried enough tears to last a lifetime. But then I consider the tragedies that befall others, and I have to wipe away the tears I shed for them.
I’ve bawled my eyes out after break-ups and cried at funerals. I’ve sobbed silently (somewhat embarrassed) watching any every sad movie I’ve ever seen, and gotten all soppy at weddings.
I was distraught when my dog died, and when my favourite grandmother passed away.
I’ve sobbed uncontrollably in the shower, the tears washing with the water down the drain, but not taking away the pain. Not really.
For those of you who don’t know my story, years of infertility, including 9 IVF cycles, will open the floodgates on a whole lot of crying.
Big gulping sobs, the sort that suck your breath away until eventually your pitiful attempt at letting it all out is reduced to a sad struggle for air. I cried those tears stuck in the staff room of the infertility clinic (OK Fertility Centre) while waiting to find out why the baby that was supposed to be in my womb wasn’t. They’d stuck me in there (for privacy I’m sure) but also because such sorrow had to hidden away from all the hope in the waiting room.
A few days later a solitary tear rolled silently down my cheek and turned to salt as I was wheeled into surgery for an emergency operation to remove my ectopic pregnancy, not to mention my tube. I had no energy left to cry.
I’ve felt the sting of tears at so many Baby Showers – it’s a funny term, don’t you reckon – sort of implying that having a baby is so simple – like manna from the sky. I guess the analogy is that babies come from heaven, and what usually falls from the heavens is wet and precipitous. And the Baby Shower is the calm before the labour storm. Only not in my case.
I’ve wept in shared grief with my children’s birth parents – knowing their tears, like mine, are all wet and salty.
And I know that tears are wet and salty whether shed in sorrow or in joy.
I steeled myself not to cry when our beautiful daughter was placed in my arms – at 13 months old her shock and anguish was unbearable to watch, let alone feel. Who were these strange new ‘parents’ and what was going on in a room where five other babies were also finding families and the collective emotional outburst was piercing – sorrow played in stereo in a chorus of crying?
She was inconsolable and I could only hug her gushing grief, trying to stay strong enough not to get upset by the flood surge of her sorrow, so as not to heighten its raging torrent.
It was a shared experience, yet so intensely personal that I could only feel her distress and confusion as an extension of my own, like pins and needles in my fingers and toes, at the extremities of my emotions. My happiness was its own suffusion, yet I didn’t allow myself tears of any kind. Our brave daughter was shedding tears enough for us all – how can I ever thank her enough for going through the pain of becoming ours?
Six and a half years later our handsome son arrived in our lives at 8.5 months old and with a big smile on his face, so this time happy tears were allowed.
I like to think that tears are always positive no matter why they are wept – you know that saying ‘you need a good cry’. Sometimes we really do need it.
I like to think that I’ve cried more tears of happiness than sadness in my life, and for that I’m lucky. It’s how I like to think.
To me crying is the ultimate expression of ‘going with the flow’, adding our own energy into the universal river of life. You should try it, often.
When we cry we surrender to the moment – to its sorrows and its joys and the beauty regardless.
We let go of our despair (or at least some of it), heighten happiness and we make memories. Think about the most memorable, defining moments of your life and they will usually involve tears (hopefully more of the jubilant variety).
So if you feel like you need a ‘good cry’, mawkish old me has a couple of movie recommendations to get you started – The Pursuit of Happyness , Always and my favourite Steel Magnolias (1989 it seems was a big year for tear-jerkers as well as hair, and come to think of it, my first real break-up).
But if you would prefer to laugh at the crocodile tears that toddlers and pre-schoolers shed (for perfectly valid reasons of course), this website ‘Reasons my son is crying’ is a crack-up (plus there’ a new book) My 3.5 year old son Little Yang’s crazy reason would be because his shirt is wet – that would be from the few, tiny teardrops that fell onto it after he started bawling because the apple was green not red!
So ‘happy crying’, and please share your stories of tears, crocodile tears and favourite tear-jerkers.
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