I’d always hear that in the Victorian era, children where to be “seen and not heard.” Since crying can be kind of noisy, I imagine there had to be ways to discourage it in young children. When my eight-year old granddaughter Kyra reintroduced me this week to Alice in Wonderland, the Lewis Carroll classic recommended in the core curriculum for 3rd graders, I discovered one of the ways that generation discouraged tears.As the daughter and granddaughter of creative artists, Kyra found a way to enact the story of Alice and she performed it during our zoom session. She had selected particular stuffed animals and dolls from the mountainous number that inhabit her bedroom, then dressed them as characters and presented the Alice story to me on-line. Kyra seemed especially engaged, as was I, with the story’s magic trick that caused Alice to become a giant version of herself. Then later, magic again made her a much tinier version. After the doll that represented giant Alice had cried lots of giant tears, a dramatic danger emerged in the play became Alice then became tiny Alice. Now represented by the tiny doll, she said, “Wish I hadn’t cried so much. I’m drowning in my own tears.”
As American children growing up in the 40s and 50s, my siblings and I were not allowed to cry, except in the privacy of our own room or in the bathroom. Sometimes if one of us five or six kids started to cry, my father would say in an angry voice, tinged with disgust, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” The message we took from that was “your distress, pain or sorrow is not real or important. Get over it.” If we had company and one of us became upset and started to cry we would be sent to the bathroom to stay until we could compose ourselves. Then we were allowed to return to be with the rest of the family. The message here was “crying is not something you do in public. You must be composed and unemotional in order to be in the presence of others.”
In my forties, as a mental health professional I studied hypnosis and during that process, I was hypnotized often. We potential practitioners would practice with one another in order to learn the techniques. Each time that I went into a hypnotic trance, no matter who was directing the hypnosis, or what else transpired in the session, tears would stream down my face. There was no distressful affect, just tears. It was as though, once I entered a significant level of relaxation, tears would automatically flow. No one offered much of an explanation for this phenomenon at the time. Now if you google “crying during hypnosis” you learn that the releasing of emotions during hypnosis is seen as one of the ways that hypnosis aids healing. The act of crying is seen as essential to maintain emotional balance and physical health. The relaxation that occurs during hypnosis allows emotions that have been held in, perhaps for a long time, to find a safe, and relatively comfortable way out.
In spite of the social rules of various cultures, one of the most important functions of tears is that they give human beings a way to express sorrow and longing. One of my sons taught me this when he was only 6 years old. When Kenny was an infant, our family had employed a woman named Margaret Brantley as baby-sitter or nanny to our three children. Partly due to the wisdom Margaret brought to us from her own life experience, and that of her African American culture and community, she became a significant member of our family. My sister and I relied on her so often for advice we used to tease one another that she was raising us along with the kids. Due to a job relocation, just before Kenny was ready for first grade, our family moved from Detroit to Lincoln Nebraska, leaving this wise elder behind.
We made arrangements for Margaret to visit us a couple of months after the move. Having never been on a plane she refused to experiment with that travel option, so she rode a bus for 24 hours from Detroit Michigan to Lincoln Nebraska in order to spend a week with us. The visit was delightful, the five of us were so glad to see her and enjoyed showing her our new town. The morning she left, because I had an early morning meeting, my husband and the three kids drove her to the bus station without me. That evening, when I arrived home, 6-year-old Kenny ran out to the car to greet me. “I’ve been crying and crying and I can’t stop crying,” he said as he jumped into my arms. After a brief hug I put him on his feet and bent down to offer comfort. “What are your tears saying?” I asked. Without hesitation he told me, “They’re saying Margaret! Margaret! Margaret!
My women’s group were meeting, as we did often in winter, at the bunk house on my friend Carol’s ranch in North Texas. Nothing fancy, just a big room with a fireplace, a bunch of sofas for sitting and sleeping, and an open kitchen with a counter covered with food provisions for the entire weekend and more. This particular time when we came into circle, I was definitely on the emotional side of the medicine wheel, my daughter having been diagnosed with breast cancer, and the treatment not going well. My friend Carol had her arm around me as we sat together on one of the sofas. As the session went on I was struggling to “keep it together,” which means to stifle my tears. Carol caught on to this activity pretty quickly and moved even closer, whispering in my ear, “Mother’s tears are a sacred.” To the whole group, she said, “pass the sacred tissues,” and that became the name of the tissue box from that day forward.
