Tears

The trajectory of a tear depends on the shape of the body, I suppose. Mine pool until they are large like lemons because I like to see how long I can keep them sitting there precariously on the edge of an eyelid before spilling out and down my cheeks, hopping off my chin, falling onto my chest, and finally losing steam somewhere north of my navel.

I cry easily and often.

 I cry silently and in loud chokes and moans—

lying still and also in fits and terrors.

 I cry by myself,

or with my people,

or sometimes,

in front of big sprawling rooms of strangers. 

In some seasons, I cry so much that I develop little saline rashes all down the front of my face. 

I am unapologetic about all of this. 

I do not repent. 

Nor do I ask for such self-betrayal from others.

In fact, I don’t allow my students to apologize for tears. They come into my office with news of dead grandmothers and sexual assaults, and otherwise bleeding hearts.

“I'm so sorry I’m crying.” They croak out.

I shake my head.

 Perhaps it is rude to try and force a lesson in these tender moments, but mostly, I do.

 “Remember, I don’t accept apologies for crying.”

 “Yes, I know, sorry.” They say.

I let this one slide.

I think it's important to tell them over and over again that it is ok to cry. Because there is so much unlearning for most of us to do in this area. I know many people have a very different relationship with crying than I do. Some prefer to avoid it if at all humanly possible. I’d say the key word is “humanly” here. Others of us feel estranged from our tears—perpetually waiting on them to come back to us or to meet them for the first time, and they just keep refusing to show up. It’s all very sad.

Whether we cry or not, tears –as a concept –are fascinating.

I have been curious about their function for many years. Crying, though I enjoy it, seems impractical to me. It makes sense that we breathe because we need to take in some elements from our environment, and we need to release others back out into the world for other creatures to soak up. This is an explainable circle of life kind of thing. Similarly, sweating cools us down, pee gets rid of what we don’t need. But tears? What exactly do they do besides streaking an otherwise immaculate mascara job? When I have posed this question to friends, they say things like, “well, they make you feel better,” which can certainly be true, but my question is, why do they make us feel better? How?

Every now and then, I scan the internet for articles that explain the physiological rationale behind wet, watery eyeballs. The internet doesn’t have much certainty for me, but I still like what I find in my wanderings. My favorite theory is a sociological one. It suggests that tears are useful because they can be seen from a way off, which means they can signal to a community that something might not be ok with one of its members. Even if the member has set out on their own a bit.

I like that God, or the universe, understood the human impulse to try and hide the truth about our circumstances from others. We don’t want them to worry—to overwhelm or frighten them. We don’t want them to see either that we are too weak or too in love. We are embarrassed by both our pain and our joy, and so we rein them in attempting to hide the evidence of our vulnerability. But sometimes, no matter how much we swallow and tilt our heads, no matter how little we blink or how long we let a drop sit teetering on the edge, our tears betray us, falling on now flushed faces revealing that we are still as human as we ever were.

This week I was hanging out with some youngins’. I mean, “technically,” we are all Millennials, but I am on the Gen X end of that classification, while they sit much nearer to the Gen Z line. At some point in our evening together, we started discussing emojis, and it became evident that there were several whose meaning either flat out eluded me or to which I had attributed a meaning that was inconsistent with the masses.

 This is one of the emojis in question.

My younger friends see this as a smug face, and they will accept/allow that some even use it to imply something sexy is afoot. This is strange to me, as I see this little stick-face as very clearly emanating sad vibes.

“But it is smiling.” They kept saying to me.

“Its eyebrows are raised.”

“It is not smiling,” I’d say back (because, in my view, it isn’t). They explain that an upturned set of lips generally gets referred to as a smile in this neck of the woods called earth, but I remain uncompelled.

“I turn my lips up all the time when I’m not happy.” I thought. And then, at some point in the week, it clicked for me. When I look at this emoji, and when I send it, I mean to practice magic. I want, with this little yellow face and also with my own real human one, to say two things at once. I want to communicate something like this: “I am sad, please notice that I am sad, but also, you don’t need to be sad (or worried, or put out) on account of my sadness. Don’t focus on the waterfalls that have sprung forth from my eyes, instead, direct your attention to this half-grin at the bottom of my face, and because I have given you that, you can be absolved of the responsibility of me.”

 That’s my impulse.

To smile like a maniac as I sob at you.

Thank God for the tears that keep us honest despite ourselves.

 It's funny when children first learn to fake-cry. They wail and shake shoulders and gnash teeth, but once they are given what they want, it is clear that those lids have never been dryer a day in their little-tiny-baby lives. We start, around that time, to use the presence of tears as evidence of distress which can be a helpful metric, but again, tears don’t always show up even when they are summoned. Some people fear tears are the worn-out weapons of weepy women and children manipulating the people in their life for ill gain. I am sure this happens. Most things do. But in my experience, to the extent that tears are weaponized, it is just as often the dry-eyed who are in possession of ammunition.

“They’re just trying to get attention,” they say smugly.

“Might they have need of it then?” I always wonder.

 I am the aunt of something like 19 people, admittedly, I have started to lose track. I am a Godmother and a “third-parent” to at least one family, and so I am aware that children (and teenagers) (and adults) throw tantrums, but I would suggest that if a human is making a fuss, even if it is unlovely, and dancing on the very last nerve, you have been given from God above, that fuss should, at the very least make us curious about the other person’s humanity. Have they been fed, watered, rested, engaged? Have they been allowed to be wild or to get quiet, or to be at the center of things for a little while? I am not suggesting that we bend or give in to bad behavior or that we break our own often hard-earned boundaries but shouldn’t we at least look for answers as much as we jump to them?

 When I was probably 5 or 6, and my sister was 15 or 16, her friend Jill was visiting as my mother was preparing dinner. At some point, while she was cooking, I cut myself, and my sister sat me on the counter to check things out. It wasn’t a life-threatening injury, but I was bleeding. My mother looked right over at my little bloody self and, without missing a beat, said, “don’t you go crying on my tortillas, girl”.  Jill found this to be the most hilarious moment she’d ever experienced up to that point. She has a large husky laugh that fills a room as it did that day and every time she has remembered it since.  Apparently, this approach to parenting was unfamiliar to her.

My mother has been a comforter to me on many occasions in my life—when I was 4 or 5 and had a 104 temperature one night when I mistakenly thought a dear friend had been in a car accident in 5th grade, and then again when I wept like a wild woman upon receipt of my first “B” in college. I am thankful for those moments. But tears have not always been encouraged or even allowed for Black women. Many families who are descendants of enslaved people remain fearful, consciously or unconsciously, that fostering sensitivity in their children will put them at even greater risk.

 People who are in touch with their feelings might scream or stomp, giggle or refuse and if to do those things at the wrong time is a liability—or maybe even a death sentence, then you might have to try to suffocate the impulse at its source. I think that the taking of someone’s tears is one of the most diabolical sins of slavery, made worse only if you force a parent to seem to do the job for you. That’s the kind of thing that can really make you cry. And it isn’t just those of us who carry the trauma of slavery. It is little boys who are asked to be men. And men who are told that the worst thing they could be is soft. It is young professionals who are taught that business is cold and they should be too.

There used to be a theory that tears transported toxins out of our bodies. That notion is largely discredited now, biologically speaking. But we are more than biology. Relationally tears are reminders to check in on our fellow earthlings, making sure everyone is doing ok—keeping devils and demons from skulking about unnoticed. Devils and demons need to be caught in a community because devils and demons can be quite catching.

Tears are a spiritual defense as well because they are a step—a way—forward.

The old has gone.

The new has come.

We are not pretending anymore.

We are accepting what is,

and moving from grace to grace.

Tears then, are little baptisms—

and we

our own priests.