The Art of Not
Crying
Mom and I didn’t cry.
When we were growing up, Daddy would
cry over something sentimental—The Little
Prince or “Why the Chimes Rang.” Mom would cry out of frustration from lost
dignity and lost dreams.
I remember overhearing a
conversation between her and my older sister Dana. (Yes, as Sondheim says, “Children Will
Listen.”) Mom asked Dana which she
thought was sadder, the fate of Anne in The
Diary of Anne Frank or the fate of
Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire.
“Anne Frank!” Dana said.
“I think Blanche because Anne Frank
lived and died with dignity. Blanche was
humiliated.”
Dana pointed out that we didn’t know
how Anne Frank died, but that wasn’t the point.
To our mother Blanche, seeking love and security and being rejected and humiliated,
was sadder than Anne’s being targeted because she was a Jew and dying with
dignity.
Mother used to cry during the
service at St. John’s Episcopal Church, which I knew was a breach of
etiquette. The liturgy was
Renaissance—King James-- and Episcopalians were supposed to recite it for its
eloquence, not reflect on its meaning, for God’s sake.
I asked Mom, “Why were you crying in church?
What were you thinking about that made you so sad?”
“I was thinking ‘If it weren’t for
God, I’d be divorced.’”
I didn’t know whether she was
praising God or cursing Him.
When I was a little girl and heard
Mother play the piano—unless it was a sing-along—I cried because the way she
played made her sound so sad. But I
didn’t think anyone had caught me crying until I came across some letters
written back in 1949, when I was four and staying with my mother’s parents, my
Grandparents Robison, in Los Angeles.
Before I’d been sent there—where I never cried even when no one was
looking—Daddy had spoken of my crying jags.
Really? I knew that, years later,
he confessed that when I was a baby and had nightmares, crying out for comfort
in the night, he’d spanked me.
“That was a terrible thing to do,”
he told me later.
“I know,” I said. “But I don’t remember.”
“Subconsciously you do,” he said.
I nodded and didn’t say, “You know
what, Daddy? You’re doing things right
now that I’m conscious of and am going to remember. Like yelling for no good reason. Like calling us names.”
I didn’t try to be honest with my
father until after he and my mother separated.
Then he asked my sister Dana and me for honest feedback and
suggestions. I felt—what’s that word
they’re always using?—empowered! I felt
that what I had to say mattered and that, after all, my father wasn’t a madman
I had to totally avoid. He was someone
with whom I could be frank.
Dana and I read each other’s
letters, and I thought we were saying about the same thing in a slightly
different way. That’s what Dana thought
too.
But Daddy accepted Dana’s letter,
and he called mine a poison pen letter.
Our relationship didn’t get better
until years after that.
I never let him see me cry, but he
let me see him.
Then I started to notice that tears
had run dry.
My brother David didn’t cry any
more. He still had seizures, but he
didn’t cry—not from frustration, not from the poignancy of a movie, not at all.
My dad didn’t cry tears any more,
and neither did my mother, even when her bottom lip trembled during moments of
confusion and fear.
I started to theorize that after
people build up enough emotional scar tissue, their tear ducts go dry.
But my sister Suzy still cried. I wondered whether she simply didn’t have
enough scar tissue. Hadn’t she suffered
enough to stop crying too?
Before Mom moved to Aegis, we had a
care-taker come during the day, and when I gave her a ride after work one time,
she told me that Mom had cried.
“Your mom cried, and then I started
crying, and she asked me, ‘Why are you crying?’ and I said, ‘Because you’re
crying. Why are you crying?’ and your
mom said, ‘I’m crying because I can’t remember your name.’ So I told her my name, and we both stopped
crying.”
Happy ending. But where did this all start?
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