When I was younger and watching a movie with Mom and Dad I always wondered why Mom would cry at something in the movie. In fact, I used to tease her about it. I even remember going to see "A League of Their Own" with my uncle, aunt, cousin, and another cousin...my aunt and cousin (she is only a year older than me) cried at the end! My cousin told me I needed to have a sister to "get it".
Now? Now I can cry at a television commercial! It can't just be hormones or I would have cried for years and years. Just lately a Kleenex commercial can make me want to cry like I lost my best friend! Maybe it takes a woman/person time to get some age on them to understand the workings and dealings of the world to make them cry.
I remember at my grandfather's funeral, my great-grandmother was brought to the funeral home. I was 19 at the time, and it took me that long to figure out the difference between the tears of a young woman and the tears of an older woman. I watched my great-grandmother, with an uncle and my father holding her arms on either side, weep. It was something from deep within. It was a low, deep sound. She didn't scream, although I'm sure she wanted to. She did not curse God. She didn't say hardly a word. She just looked at him, bowed her head and wept. She had lost another son in a life when your children are supposed to out live you. (She lost her first son before he turned one year old. My grandfather was the first living child after him.)
In her life, a young woman is still learning what is worth tears, when not to scream and when not to curse someone's name. As a woman gets older, she observes and absorbs hardships and feelings from the world. She adapts and realizes when it is best to cry alone, cry herself to sleep, and curse the world in the privacy of scrubbing her own bathroom floor. Every woman is taught these lessons differently. Every woman reacts to the lessons differently.
A woman never stops learning the ways of the world in tears, but she becomes wise. This is when she begins to weep, to sob, to cry without tears. Maybe I'm starting to learn.
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1 comment:
For me, it's coffee commericals. They get me every time.
You must believe me when i say, it's not the hormones... It is a woman thing, but it deals with deeper things that hormones can't explain away.
Maybe this is one lesson that i learned a long time ago, too, but i experienced more grief at a younger age than most people of our generation. It is even remarked upon that my first outting (after birth) was to a wake. This could account for why i am such a freak of nature. You know i love to wear color, but maybe i was meant to don the black. This could explain why i am obsessed with the dark and unusual. (but i digress)
I have scrubbed away the tears, but for me it's always the kitchen, not the bathroom. And sometimes tears are the only way to exhaust myself into sleeping.
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