You may identify with or have cried for the people who were stranded in New Orleans with no food, water, shelter, and no way out.
We interviewed one woman in Alabama who had lost her life fortune, witnessed her business going through bankruptcy, and suffered her own personal setbacks. She shared these details slowly and with some feelings. But when she started talking about her husband’s pain and her son’s adjustment to their life, she couldn’t help but cry. She didn’t cry for herself, she cried for her son and her husband. She said it was because she felt for her husband; “he had worked so hard for his dream, and now it was gone.” She didn’t cry when she talked about herself or having to work harder or having to feed the dogs that used to live on the lot at their business. She didn’t cry when she said, at this point, she was the only person in her household working. She cried when she thought of someone else’s pain.
Secret Tears are those shed alone—these are the times when even your closest friends don’t know you cry. The reasons vary, but we would rather talk about the situation than share that we cried about it. These tears may be private and we don’t want to share these feelings with others just yet or at all. In these circumstances we may be ashamed of crying or think that someone may think we’re weak for crying and would rather do it alone than be talked about for crying in public.
Later in the book, you will be introduced to Mary Beth Armstrong, a devoted wife and mother of two grown boys. When she received advice that told her that she had to stay strong and not let her family see her cry after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, she tried to oblige. It is noble to spare our family, children, and even coworkers our pain. But over time, these secret tears need some release, and as you will see in this book, they sometimes find it in the most unlikely of places.
One woman shared in the survey why she shed secret tears:
“Because I feel that it may exhibit a sign of some weakness and emotional instability, and as a black woman we are expected to be strong, so it would appear to be out of character for myself, a black woman, to cry.”
Adrian King, a financial aid officer at a New York college, said that she would never let her coworkers and subordinates see her cry. Not that she is opposed to crying, but for so long she has been the resourceful one, the one that other people rely on, and she would not want to let them down. That is the burden that secret tears carry.
The next two sets of Emotion Focused Tears occur because of something that either has happened to us or something that we have done.
Remorseful Tears fall when we know we’ve played a role in the problem that caused the tearfulness. Remorseful tears tend to serve as a breakthrough when we just can’t take the guilt or hide any longer and just cry about what we did wrong. Remorseful tears can arise for something that we had little or nothing to do with, but yet we still wish we could change things. All of the people who have ever watched a flood or witnessed someone in peril and cried because they wished that there was something, anything they could do—those are remorseful tears.
Bonnie, a UC Berkeley student, cried because she felt so much guilt that she didn’t feel she had time to listen to the story of a family that had lost everything to Hurricane Katrina. She was going to gut houses in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, and at the time, that seemed like it took precedent over one story of one family. She went back the next day to speak to the family and give them their time to express their loss and time for her to share her tears of remorse.
In our survey, we read about remorseful tears, and some of the simple words that these women used to describe their feelings are best described by sharing their own words with you. When we asked them, “How do you feel when you cry?” those who experienced tears of remorse shared the following feelings with us:
“Angry and defeated.”
“Filled with anxiety, like I would explode.”
“A mess!!!!”
“Bitterness building up in my throat.”
“Confused, regretful.”
Mournful Tears are the tears that we are most accepting of and empathetic toward. These tears come with the loss of a loved one or the metaphorical death of something important in our lives. Losing a loved one is a long-term grief process that is almost impossible to fully recover from. It is said that time heals all wounds. But does it really? We have found, as Lorissa McMillan from California told us about the loss of her mother, “You never get over it. Somehow you get through it, but you never ever get over it.”
Women that have experienced mournful tears described their feelings this way:
“Weak, shaky.”
“Heavy.”
“Lost, alone, confused, and abandoned.”
Problem Focused Tears
Problem Focused Tears tend to be tears that are focused on solutions to life’s problems. We cry these tears when we are more likely to think our way through it, come up with a new plan, or talk ourselves out of a sad place.
Angry Tears come when we are in situations that move us to aggressive measures. Many women described situations where they may have cried during an argument not because they were sad, but because their significant other just angered them so that they were moved to tears. They so badly wanted to change the situation, but in the midst of the anger, they had no way to release the aggression but to cry (or throw something). And sometimes we need to let off a little steam.
Alethea Bonello from Riverdale, Georgia, explained angry tears this way: “Crying is your body’s ‘pressure releaser,’ like on a pressure cooker. It allows a little steam to escape so you can focus on the challenge at hand.”
Frustrated Tears come when we are fed up with the situation we may be in at the time. One woman described how she hated her job so much that she would sneak off to the bathroom and just cry out her frustration to the Lord. She said she felt like there was nothing she could do about her job at the time because she couldn’t move on until she had something else in place, but her crying in the bathroom when things really got rough helped her cope with her situation. Patsy Turner, a medical professional from Helena, Alabama, put the feelings of frustrated tears into words: “Crying for me is when I’m so emotional that words can’t express the level I’m on.”
Breakthrough Tears are ones we most associate with joy. These tears are shed when we have a breakthrough moment of any type. Win the lottery—cry. Have a baby—cry. Finish that doctorial thesis—cry. These are the tears we have spoken to women about over the years who have had those successful breakthrough experiences and they just can’t hold back these tears. We can have breakthrough tears with our own triumphs or the triumphs of others. That emotion we feel when someone else gets the big prize on a game show, when a talk show host shares the story of someone’s triumphant journey, when our own children graduate from college, high school, or even kindergarten. Our breakthrough crying is our turn to jump for joy and let out that little cry while we do it. Gwendolyn Jones of Missouri City, Texas, had a beautiful take on how she sees tears. “It’s a weeping in the spirit; a cleansing and a renewal of the soul, mind, and body.” Now if that isn’t a breakthrough, we don’t know what is.
You Can’t Make Me Cry!
Ninety-five percent of the women in our survey said that they cried in the past twelve months. Of those women, only sixty-three percent of them would consider themselves women who cry. Twenty-six percent of the women said that they would not consider themselves women who cry. Is there anything wrong with that? What if you don’t cry? In the movie The Holiday, Cameron Diaz’s character hadn’t cried since the death of her parents when she was a child. Her inability to cry in the movie was related to her inability to let go. At the end of the film, Cameron’s character cried for the first time when she realized she was in love and that if she didn’t let go she would lose that love. Although this is a Hollywood example, is it far from what we experience in life? Many of the women we spoke to who said they didn’t cry during trying times said it was because they felt like they didn’t want to lose control, be embarrassed, or appear to be weak and unable to deal with their own lives.