I’m a crier. I always have been. Since birth, apparently. My father delights in telling me the story of one particular time when I was in hospital as a baby. “Even the nuns wanted to hand you back,” he says gleefully, teasing.
“Morning, noon and night you cried, Jennifer.”
In case I was in any doubt.
And I really shouldn’t be. Because I have aunts who’ll back up the tales of my tearful tendencies.
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I’ll be honest, I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to do with this information. I’ve little recollection of the hospital occasion in question, on account of only being a few months old at the time. So, I can’t even be sure what was bothering me to justify my stance. And I feel I should probably be excused because of my tender lack of years. But I think a tear-filled infancy may have left lasting scars on my parents.
You know, the kind that you might acquire when you’re the parent of teenagers. And you find yourself looking at them, during one of those particularly head-melting moments, silently thinking, “I cannot wait until you’re parenting a version of yourself, Bucko. I am so going to enjoy that.”
But this too shall pass we’re told.
Still, I wouldn’t like to claim that my parents enjoyed it when I gave birth to seven non-sleepers. Though, “they take after their mother”, may have been pointed out through muffled laughter — repeatedly. But maybe, just maybe, it momentarily crossed their minds that it was good I was getting some insight into what it was like to try to be a functioning adult in society, on little to no sleep. The sort of insight I may have, in turn, helped give them.
Anyway, here I am now, a fully grown sleep-resisting, or at least sleep-resenting adult — because really, needing to sleep is an incredibly boring inconvenience. It turns out, you don’t completely outgrow everything.
And look, it’s even a helpful attribute on occasion, in this crazy, busy, life, allowing me to get work, laundry and telly watching done, says she trying to block out all the well-documented health advice about the danger of lack of zzzzs. I should clarify, it’s not that I can’t sleep, it’s that I don’t want to sleep. Because it gets in the way of my life. And do you know, I’m fairly sure this is the same attitude that five-year-old me had too.
But crying, well now that’s a different one. Here I am, a grown adult, who struggles to keep my tears at bay. And I’m certain it’s become worse with motherhood. “It’s your hormones”, everyone told me as I sat there with a big, pregnant belly, sobbing at TV adverts, songs, and a scene from McCoys in Fair City.
But reader it was not my hormones, for baby after baby vacated my uterus, and still I leave the room when that scene with Mufasa in the Lion King comes on. I have spent far longer than is probably considered normal, dwelling on the familial trauma inflicted on Simba. You know, after the animators decided to stop drawing his dad.
I can’t bear to see other people crying. I am she who joins in. I cry at the television. I cry at the news. I cry because of a story I’m covering.
I cry because I remember that I didn’t make one of my son’s Christmas concerts eight years ago (oh God! Here I go again). I cry at the funerals of people I never knew. It is mortifying.
Even the sound of a baby or small child crying if I’m out doing the weekly shop is enough to set me off. I have found myself on occasion, grip on the trolley handle growing tighter, willing their mum or dad to immediately abandon whatever they’re doing and see to their little one internally murmuring, “please pick up your baby. Please pick up your baby” in a kind of retail meditation if you will. Some grounding exercises in the cereal aisle.
Because it’s far less socially acceptable for me to be bawling buying Rice Krispies.
It’s a standing joke here. “Mum are you crying at a cartoon?” ask little voices, amused but following up with a reassuring hug or arm pat, all the same. As a child, I loved Laurel and Hardy movies but then sometimes I’d cry because it was sad they were dead. Still, I stick to comedies for entertainment viewing mostly here because as a general rule, they’re less upsetting than children’s films.
I haven’t found a way to keep the tears in check. Or even a particular positive to them.
“Mum really feels things”, the children reckon.
But maybe I’ll outgrow it, yet.