Does Crying Work?

I’m not a crier. I don’t often tear up and I rarely get weepy. If I’m full-on crying you can bet that I’m in the middle of a personal crisis and I’m hiding in my closet (a big one.) I give myself exactly 25 minutes to have a raging pity party and then I dry my eyes and get to work on my to do list.


I’m not sure when I decided that crying was bad. Based on my children, who still burst out into tears at surprisingly frequent intervals, I’d say that this approach to life is relatively new. It probably began when crying stopped working. Apparently it still works for my kids because it’s a weapon they yield with surprising skill. If they want a certain forbidden sugary treat, then a well placed teary outburst—usually in the snack-cake aisle of a busy grocery store at around 5:30 at night—works wonders. When I’m tired I will throw money at problems to make them go away, especially when it only costs me $2.99. They also employ the weepy weapon whenever I’m on the phone. One of the children will come up to me bawling loudly and mumbling incoherent babble about a video game controller. He knows I’m not going to bother to investigate the incident because I’M ON THE PHONE! I go straight to punishment by removing the offending video game controller from the boy who is innocently lying on his bed playing the game. He tries to follow me explaining why he has been wronged but I don’t care about justice. I just want them all to shut up. They usually leave me alone once I sit on the controller because no teenager in his right mind is going to fish under his mother’s behind for it.

There is a point when crying stops working entirely. My daughter reached this critical point more than a year ago, she just doesn’t know it yet. You see, she cries or whines constantly. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Let’s say that 45% of the time she’s in tears and 65% of the time she’s sporting a different emotion—still it’s pretty bad. We’ve managed to eat our way through an entire family dinner, from setting the table to doing the dishes, while she bawls over the way her carrots were placed on her plate. The boys hardly notice anymore. They even recount their day while their sister’s nose runs and her face begins to look like it was hit by a fire hose.

Maybe I got to that point and that’s why I’m not a crier—it must not work for me. But, it’s Christmastime and I have a moment every single Christmas where I am reduced to a humiliating mass of tears. It’s when I hear Handel’s Messiah. I can’t help it. That piece of music is wired directly into my tear ducts. I heard it for the first time this season last night and I sat on the couch with wet tracks flowing down my cheeks. My husband came over and sat down beside me. We’ve been married a while now and he knows me pretty well so he didn’t say a word, he just put his arm around me. So maybe crying still works for me after all.