The other day, I posted a picture on my Facebook page of my one-year old, crying on the floor with a cracker in his hand at 6:30 am. He was generally pissed at life and didn’t want to take off his Mickey Mouse pajama shirt that was a 12 month – he wears a 2T now.
So I did what any thoughtful parent would do. I let him lay on the floor and cry it out. There was no calming him. This was a Class A tantrum – the worst of the worst.
I’ve gotten to the point where I can pretty much tune the chaos of our house out now. It drives my husband nuts and I’m like, “What? I can’t even hear our small children body-slamming each other from the adjacent room.”
I like to think that mom bodies instinctively give us survival skills so we can raise our young without going batshit crazy. Important skills, such as tuning out a tantrum or having an oddly large amount of strength to carry a screaming and kicking toddler out of a store under one arm while also juggling two gallons of milk in the other hand.
But back to the one year-old. For maybe a millisecond, or five minutes, no big difference, I considered getting down on the floor with him and crying.
Adulting is stressful. And so serious sometimes. You have to pay taxes and mortgages and actually remember to save things you can deduct on your tax return. And on top of that, work full time and raise kids to be good human beings while maintaining a healthy work/life balance, attending all home baseball games for the team my husband coaches, remembering to pay the woman that cleans the house – I can’t do it all, maintain healthy relationships with friends and family, be social, volunteer, and take vitamins while exercising regularly and making sure the family doesn’t go over budget for the month.
That was enough to make me want to cry. I didn’t, because I had to go to work and there is a time and a place for adults to have temper tantrums.
I like to cry in the shower. I never get an extremely long time to shower, so I limit that to days where I can leave the kids alone for ten minutes and not worry about them strangling each other.
Sometimes, I’ll watch a Disney movie with the kids and sob the whole time. Yeah, Coco was a sad fucking movie, but I was also really stressed out about something at the time, and once I started crying I just couldn’t stop. I had a nice hour long tear fest with no questions asked.
Most of the time, I’ll save my tears for after the kids go to bed and before my husband gets home from baseball. Sometimes I have sold 2-3 hour window to let it out.
Okay, I know this sounds unhealthy, but I don’t cry every night. Sometimes it’s just nice to shed a couple tears and wallow in your sorrows.
And occurring to a medical journal that may or may not be legitimate because I found it via Google, crying actually has extremely positive side effects.
“Tears can elevate our mood better than any antidepressant available. … The shedding of tears improved the mood of almost 90 percent of criers compared to the eight percent who reported crying made them feel worse.”
So that’s all I have say.
Science – or Google – backs me up on this one. Life can suck and you can get stressed and sometimes you just need to let it out.
So in let it go. Cry. Ugly sob. Let mascara run down your face and make the bags under your eyes bigger than they already are. You will feel much better later.
Until Next Time,
Jamie
