Cry Like a Baby

Tearing up and tearing down false notions

It has been sixteen years since I was fully sighted and, in almost every way, I have adjusted to life as a blind person. When it comes to transportation, though, I often find myself frustrated because, uniquely in this slice of life, I am required to relinquish a sizable portion of my autonomy. This requirement is subtle and unspoken but deeply embedded in the experience, whether I use public transportation, a private service like Uber, or get into the car of a friend. Without a doubt, most of my transportation helpers are good people but their systems or circumstances or personal habits and preoccupations loom large and they often miss the part they play in minimizing or exciting the stress that is built into the life of a person who is dependent. For me, this plays out in an exhausting cycle of uncertainty. Each and every time I ride, I must yield my will to unpredictable others and find the grace to endure the endless barrage of things that regularly go wrong. Just last week, for example, a 9-mile bus ride, with a company that provides door-to-door service, turned into a two-hour trip with five stops and a driver who kept getting lost, all while a broken heater roared at full blast despite the balmy summer day. By the time I arrived at my destination, I was too late for my appointment and on the verge of tears.

We have come a long way since Darwin declared that tears are “purposeless.” We now know there are three types of tears and each performs an essential function. Basal tears lubricate and nourish the eye and act as a barrier of protection to the cornea, and, reflex tears come in response to harmful irritants and help wash away anything foreign that gets into the eye. Emotional tears—like those I cried after my harrowing 9-mile ride—happen in response to biological, psychological, and sociological factors. It’s this triple-factor causality that makes it tough to distinguish exactly what we are feeling in the moment of emotion and it’s that same ambiguity that sometimes makes it feel like those who try to support us don’t get it at all.

I once had a conversation with my daughter after she had been brooding for weeks. As she revealed her complaint, a surge of emotion nearly flattened me and I began to cry. My daughter stared at me with wide-eyed disbelief then stood and walked away. I remained in my chair, alone at our dining room table, crying even more and wondering what just happened. When we finally found our way back to each other, my daughter explained that my tears upstaged her concern. That when I began to cry, instead of talking about the thing she was struggling to share, the focus was diverted to me and my emotional needs. Dr. Cornelius Randolf, a Vassar College psychology professor, studied the information that tears convey and would agree with my daughter’s assessment. Tears, he said, contain “very specific information” about the emotional and interpersonal state of a person and “prompt others to respond with empathy and concern.” Dr. Randolf’s findings make it clear that emotional tears are a specialized communication system and, better than wiping them away, we should be paying them more attention.

The human impetus for meaning-making has put us in a real fix when it comes to tears. Since our early existence, we have used the concocted term “crybaby” to define people who cry without reserve as dramatic, weak, selfish, trifling or pathetic. This puts every crier at risk of being judged and all of us at immediate odds with our biological selves. And, sadly, the criers who pay the highest costs for our ignorance are our own most precious and vulnerable. We begin telling children not to cry, to be a big-girl or boy, when they are barely out of infancy. We don’t seem to care that small children vocalize by evolutionary design because they don’t have the vocabulary to fully express needs and emotions in words. Children feel things as deeply as adults but have yet to gain the capacity and skillsets required for emotional regulation. Still, we admonish them, shame them, and punish them when we judge they shouldn’t be crying or have cried enough. I grew up being threatened with “I dare you to cry” and “I’ll give you something to cry for” and when I read Oprah Book Club author Ashley C. Ford’s debut memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, I got the feeling she was a recipient of that same type of treatment. Ford tells a volatile and intimate story of family secrets, trauma and grief but, to my recollection, mentions crying only once or twice. While she may have simply chosen to focus on events rather than emotions, I wonder if the tears that seem to be missing in her narrative are representative of those denied throughout her harsh upbringing.

And then there are the tears we cannot trust. Manipulative tears are often seen on public display in Karens wielding or defending their obnoxious entitlement—such as we saw in Laura Siegemund’s tearful rant after Coco Gauff prevailed on day-one of the US Open. These tricky tears seep into the collective consciousness and make us suspicious of healthy tears. The awful result is damage to the fabric of important relationships, where we end up questioning those who have already demonstrated they can be trusted. Betrayal shows up as a stingy heart and emotional withholding while we remain completely unaware that we have been set up by false meaning.

We have to get over ourselves and embrace the fact that tears are messengers and ministers. Whether they arise from a frustrating bus ride like the one I took or a completely different experience and emotion, the evolutionary purpose of emotional tears is, by definition, for our good. I have long loved the song I’d Like to be Baby to You, first released by Roberta Flack on her Gold certified Blue Lights in The Basement album. Opening with the sound of clinking cocktail glasses and nightclub patrons talking in the background, Flack sings, in a quiet wail, “Cry like a baby, I’d like a baby, I’d like to be baby to you.” Her “reason to cry” is one of love and longing. A good reason, in my opinion, for an emotion that evokes such transparent confession and poignant desire. We would never think of calling Flack a crybaby for her expression and emotion-filled repertoire nor should we use this pejorative for others who honestly and autonomically shed tears. If wholeness is something that matters to us, we must embrace our whole selves, including the tears that nature designed. We must lay down our judgment, suspicion and self-consciousness and honor human being with the freedom to cry.

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