Big Girls Don’t Cry
The Family That Represses Together, Stays Together
It’s hard for me to allow myself to cry.
It’s not that I can’t, or that I don’t want to. My body and my brain simply won’t allow the tears to flow, at times.
I cry often enough, I suppose. How do you define the right frequency for that sort of thing?
I cry at movies that are sad or happy-sad. When I think about my deceased mother, or my beloved dog, Pavarti, who passed two years ago. When I get really frustrated about something, or when a particularly rude customer treats me poorly over the phone.
After a year of celibacy during the pandemic, I even cried the first time I had sex again. I think it was more about my mother’s death which had happened only a few months prior, but it definitely spooked the gentleman who was involved in the act.
Overall, though, I feel like I’m not doing it enough. I’m not letting myself cry when I need to. It’s not exactly a conscious thing. It just…doesn’t happen.
I think a lot about crying because my father never cries. He told me once that he couldn’t remember ever crying. Not even at the deaths of his sister or his mother. I remember he said that the closest he got to crying was when the very first shih tzu he and my stepmother owned died of old age. But the tears never actually came, of course.
My brother also doesn’t cry. I often describe my brother as emotionless. There are definitely people who avoid negative emotions, like those that cause tears. My brother seems to avoid all emotions.
I know he has hobbies and interests. He’s married and has two adorable kids whom he cherishes. He laughs when it’s appropriate. But I wouldn’t say that he’s ever happy, or elated, or sorrowful, or relaxed. He’s just sort of this blank slate of a person.
He cried once, at his wedding, and it shocked his friends and family. The emotion he displayed was unlike anything we’d ever seen from him. It was over 10 years ago and if it comes up now, we still discuss it with awe.
I’ve mentioned before that my mother never really cried, either. She would when she was overly hormonal because of PMS. But, like the rest of my family, she didn’t really have any strong emotions.
Except for anger. She had a lot of anger, both above and below the surface. It came out like strikes from a viper, full of venom and with sharp fangs of malice. It was unpredictable, and it made navigating her moods difficult for me as a child. I didn’t know when she was going to indulge my endless pestering or when she would shut it down with a snap and a shout.
I don’t blame my family for their lack of emotional vulnerability. That’s what crying is, I think. The ultimate expression of vulnerability.
My mother and father both grew up in abusive households, making that kind of vulnerability dangerous. My brother grew up watching this lack of emotional vulnerability and, I guess, decided to completely close himself off from the expression of any emotions.
Which leaves me.
Sometimes I feel like I inherited all the emotions that my family suppressed. That is sort of contrary to my opening statement about not crying enough. But it’s true. I feel like a strange mixture of too emotional and not emotional enough.
I remember very vividly my dad mocking me while I cried. We were in the car, driving to my mother’s after I declared I was too scared to sleep in his new, big house. I was crying because I was scared and wanted to go home, but I was also crying because I felt like I was failing myself for not being brave and failing my dad for rejecting his home and his time.
He saw me crying and mimicked me, making these disgusting fake sobbing sounds. He told me to stop crying. He made me feel like my tears and the emotions that came along with them were abhorrent.
Since my divorce, and since my mother’s death, my dad has seemingly gotten a little used to me crying. He still tries to stop it, because it’s apparent he can’t handle it at all. But he also seems willing to just let it happen. Resigned to the fact that he can’t make it stop and, maybe, it’s appropriate for me to “let it out.”
That’s a phrase I’ve never heard from anyone in my family. “Let it out.”
Isn’t that what you tell someone when they’ve opened themselves up emotionally, enough to cry in your presence? It’s okay to cry. My therapist tells me this all the time. It’s okay for everyone to cry when they need to.
Let it out. Scream and wail and sob and express your emotions however, you need to. Let yourself be vulnerable. Let go of the control that you’re gripping so tightly.
I want to. I need to. It’s going to take time, though, to unlearn the lessons of my past.
