The Last Word On Nothing

To be a parent is to get jerked around. Toy manufacturers jerk you around into buying useless crap. Other parents jerk you around making you worry you live in the wrong zip code. The kids themselves jerk you around into buying that second scoop of blueberry brontosaurus crunch with rainbow sprinkles.

And, of course, Hollywood jerks you around, jerking your tears. My child loves the Pixar movie, Coco. If you haven’t seen it, first of all, what the hell? You have time for Cars sequels but you can’t watch Pixar’s best movie?*

Secondly, there is this scene at the end where the main character is trying to remind his senile great-grandmother of her father, who he just left in the Land of the Dead and who will die if she forgets him. So, he uses the father’s old guitar and plays his song, which she hasn’t heard in decades because music was banned in her house.

And he plays the song and she raises her aged brows and, in a heartbreakingly tender moment,  sings along. The song, called “Remember Me,” was stolen and turned into a pop song but was originally written as a lullaby, which is how the kid plays it. It kills me every time. Then my kid turns from the screen and says, “Is this the part that makes Daddy cry?” As if he doesn’t already know, the little jerk.

The thing is, this seems to be the only time I can cry these days. I’m pretty much the mirror image of Emma (read her post from yesterday). I too have a Norwegian-American mother, but far from repressed, she’s prone to wild outbursts of tears, laughter or (frequently) both. I too have a kid who precipitates emotional rollercoasters. But somehow, I can’t seem to cry enough.

Emma says men are lucky to cry once a month. Man, I would kill for numbers like that. I’m not sure I’ve had a serious cry since Trump has been in office. Okay, one. Maybe two in the Obama years? Bush II was a dry spell but I remember crying when my cousin died toward the end of the Clinton years.

That is sad. Not sad enough to make me cry, dammit, but sad.

Experts say that a tendency to cry is associated with both empathy and neuroticism. I consider myself pretty empathic (no comment on the latter) and certainly more today than I was in my youth. Yet the more empathetic I get, the harder it is to squeeze out a tear.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m soft as hell. My kid made a heart out of Duplo Legos this morning and gave it to me because “I love you Daddy. So much.”

Yes, I melted, I’m not made of stone. This isn’t a post about how men need to be more in touch with their feelings. But I don’t do the physical act of crying. And I want to. I want that release. Experts seem to agree – at least in the literature of therapeutic psychology – that crying is good. According to the literature, it releases pent-up emotions, helps us cope and, on a good day, persuades cave men not to club us to death.

But, according to laboratory studies, crying at a movie is not the same as bawling in real life. In fact, movie crying (and, one would assume, airplane crying) is a stressful event that does not carry the cathartic release of regular crying, which is worthless to me. I don’t want some sniffling lite, I want that hard core, snot-on-the-hands, shoulder-shaking, ugly crying. The good stuff.

It’s not clear in the literature that this drop down, drag out cry is good for you, but there is evidence that it might be. It’s also not clear if it’s something we can control. With proper role models, can my kid avoid the crying trap?

Certainly, it couldn’t hurt to let it all out once in a while. I may try therapy. Or I may just try Coco again.

* Without “WALL-E” in the title.