Did your parents tell you not to cry when you were a child? If you did cry, did they ever allow you to cry, or did they always feel that they needed to stop the flow of tears by diverting your attention?

Along with my change of heart about anger, reunion also changed my opinion about crying. More pointedly my opinion changed about letting others see you cry, and whether crying is positive or negative. Just as I felt it was not appropriate to show anger, I felt that it was not good to let others see you cry. I have since decided that at times, crying is an appropriate response to certain life events. So, I no longer try to quash my tears as I once did. Not that I have turned into a blubbering, pathetic out of control creature. I still try to not melt into a whimpering soul on any and all occasions.

However, I have decided that tears have a decidedly theurapetic affect at times, and sometimes just letting your tears flow may be the best course of action. During early reunion, I knew that I needed to grieve the loss of my son, and tears are a predictable and necessary part of grieving and healing. I previously considered crying as a sign of weakness, and weakness was not something I ever wanted to project. Again, reunion changed my views on crying.

I cried more in that first year or so of reunion than I had in the past 10 years combined. Needless to say, I needed to be able to justify all those tears somehow. I needed to make some sense of my nearly constant state of weepiness. During that first year, I am fairly certain that I wept nearly every evening, and I was alone for those tears. Reunion was exciting and scary, but dealing with the past was the culprit. However, there were times driving on my way to and from work that something would trigger me and I would feel tears coming on. To say that I felt out of control would be an understatement. My all time crying record was a day in which I experienced crying jags three times in one day, once driving on the way to work, and once at home in the evening. The third crying episode was the most dramatic and worrisome. I was talking a lunch time walk at work and was doing some heavy-duty thinking. Next thing I knew tears were slipping down my cheeks as I walked down the street, and it was difficult to stop them.

Why am I sharing my excessive crying jags with others? Only to illustrate that sometimes tears are an appropriate response to a sad situation. I feel that I needed to cry, so, I did. Releasing those tears helped me heal. Some of us are afraid to really allow ourselves deep and painful feelings. We may fear that if we allow ourselves to feel the pain, we may be so overcome with it that we may not be able to recover from its path. Although it may feel safer to avoid our demons, we must face them eventually. Sometimes it may be excruciating, and yes, require many tears to flow. In the long run, I think it is worth it though.