Cry Like a Baby

When I was a baby, I cried a lot. When I wasn’t a baby, I also cried a lot. My baby blanket was named “chou bei bei,” which literally means “stinky blanket,” because it was the blanket that I’d cry into and wipe my tears (and snot) into. I remember the many times which I cried, of total desperation, of wanting to persuade, of subtle helpless disappointment, of anticipating my grandmother’s death, which she began forecasting nearly 20 years ago. In my family, I was the one who “loved to cry.”

As I became a bigger girl, I stopped crying so often. Maybe once or twice a year, from sibling drama, or subtle tears of not wanting to return to China after the summers.

Then, the crying returned, in late middle school. Tears would come more often. I can’t remember all the reasons why, but I remember some: crying from movies. Crying from wanting to go to California for school which I eventually turned down. Crying from missing people (men, men!). Crying when I would be suddenly and acutely reminded of my grandmother’s mortality. My crying when I became older was never of tantrums, but of just the essence of emotion, outpouring. Of emotion wanting to take physical form to leave my body, in order to return with some renewed clarity.

Crying is one of the things I do. I run, I meditate. I drink tea. I sleep. Et cetera. And I also cry. There’s something beautiful about shedding tears. Of being periodically reminded of the intensity of emotions you are capable of feeling. That you are feeling. Of having a tangible, physical experience and expression of sadness and grief. Of stress, of release. Fear, frustrations, disappointments. Of love. I cry here and there. I welcome it when I do.

Yesterday I cried. I spaced out for a whole hour, eating dinner and losing my appetite all at once, trying to blink away tears in front of my parents. Then I cried painfully into the pillow and cried into a phone, speaking, articulating my sadness to gain perspective and clarity. I cried like a baby.

To cry like a baby is such a true phrase, but not for its connotation of endless whining, wah-wah-wah. We cry like babies because, at least for me, when I cry I am in an eternal present. That’s one thing I learned from Jean Liedloff’s The Continuum Concept that comes back to me often: that babies have no concept of time, they live in the eternal present. That when they cry for the mother’s attention, they cry of such need and of such urgent, present, desire and grief. They don’t know when they will stop crying, when they will be in the mother’s arms. There’s no concept of chronology, of past, present, future.

When I bawled yesterday over heartache, it felt eternal. Intellectually I knew I would stop crying, that my broader grief will be overcome with living time and life, just as I have overcome similar griefs before. But the body’s visceral reaction is different and I felt like I was trapped in the immediate nowness of the tears that affected my heart and my shaking bones. And like a baby wanting its mother’s arms, I cried of eternal presence, desiring a loving chest of warmth, arms of safety, ideally of a man, ideally of the man I love. But in those quick but seemingly longer minutes of crying, I was in forever tears finding arms of nobody.

I called my best friend, my speech stuttered by a mouth shaking from crying. I articulated my feelings, my thinkings, my justifications and rationalities, my fears and hopes, my certainties and uncertainties. I spoke out the knots of inchoate feelings, untied the tangles of those crying emotions. My mind cleared. My heart hurt less.

After the phone call, I went out to our lake and ran. It was then that I was touched yet again by the beauty of crying. It’s expressive, it’s relieving. It’s cathartic. It’s time you spend which heals. But also: it’s bonding. One of the TED Talks I think of often is this one from Kelly McGonigal, where stress—oh evil stress, we say — is also a mechanism for us to reach out to others and make social connections. That’s kind of true for crying. In your baby-like vulnerability, you reach out to people. And it’s beautiful when you do. It’s been beautiful whenever I did.

How beautiful it is to cry like a baby.