Tears Together
Posted on June 6, 2008
Filed Under kids, parenting, Anxiety, challenges, sadness |
I’ve been holed up in my unhappiness and forgotten that the little lives of grade schoolers continue, with all the angst and despair of that fresh age, around me. Admittedly the majority of life has been occurring somewhat off stage for me as I wallow in my own internal drama and so it was tears after school today. Mine inspired his. We grieved together, my nine year old boy and I dropping fat, salty slips of sadness on each other’s shoulders.
O and G bounced off the bus, discarding back packs and sweatshirts and shoes on their way in for the daily snack and elbowed up to the counter saying the same thing they say every day, as if their continued nourishment hinges on their asking, “May we have a snack?”
Instead of replying, as I do everyday with my usual, “No. Only bread and water, twice a day, that’s all the food for you,” after which I would laugh or mockingly growl, I, instead, dissolved into sobs. It was so unstoic and ultimately unmaternal to let them see me weep and yet I couldn’t seem to stem the flow and they hovered, concerned and baffled about why a mother would cry at 3:30 in the afternoon with a box of Wheat Thins in one hand and a gallon of milk in the other.
But the saddest part of exposing this vulnerability to them was the reaction it inspired in my O who instantly teared up and demanded to know why I was crying, why WE were crying, a collective response to a persistent sadness. And I could only say that I was experiencing a profound and amorphous grief that would surely pass on in a few minutes - my paltry attempt to skirt the truth about the hours and hours of therapy I have endured lately, tearing open old wounds, leaving the soul to bleed and battle with bleak moments between sessions, and I’m still unsure of how to heal. I sat their on a kitchen stool, arms wrapped around his lean and, still little, body and couldn’t find the words to explain my wretched state of unhappiness. And so I stuffed a sob down deep inside the ache of my loneliness and simply said, “I can’t put my finger on it exactly. It’s just there sometimes - this sadness.” And I remembered a Free To Be Song called It’s Alright to Cry. I sang a little to him between hiccups, remembering days of riding around in the car with that very CD on loop. It only made me cry harder, these words -
Crying gets the sad out of me.
And O, braver, more concise and solution oriented than I, admitted that he, unlike his mother, knew exactly why he felt the urge to cry and explained that his presentation concerning the delivery of a four-seam fast ball hadn’t gone as well as he’d hoped that day. He confessed that his classmates had clapped for all the other presentations - how to incubate and hatch a chicken, how to make samosas, how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich - all the other kids had earned at least polite applause from their peers while he felt his delivery was met with stony silence. He said, “It hurt me that my friends didn’t clap for me today.” And the two of us began to cry all over again, he for the absence of friendship and approval and I because I did not possess the salve with which to heal his grade school wound.
And I wanted to whisper, “I’m so sorry I can’t fix you. But, you see, I can’t even fix myself.”
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