About Me

I wrote this in 1999 and it really explains a lot about me; mostly why I cannot stand to cry in front of others.   It was also the only thing I ever submitted for publication.  I still have the rejection letter........................ 

Sometimes it feels as though I have spent the better part of 25 years crying, a lifetime of tears in a quarter of a century.  I have cried silent tears, the ones that run quietly down your cheeks, like those shed at a poignant movie.  I have cried tears of anger, mad at the world and myself because I could not control how I handled such injustices, and I have cried tears with such heart-wrenching conviction, it caused my entire body to ache.  Tears that came from the deepest part of my soul and the only escape from my sorrow was an emotional blackout.   I have cried myself into depression and remained there until I felt I could again handle my own existence. 

When I was little, my father used to yell at me just to make me cry.  My mother would later tell me it was because he thought it to be humorous.  He would send me to fetch things for him and I would panic, knowing the consequences if I could not find it and I would cry.  He used to send me after his beer and then yell at me if I accidentally shook the can too much.  He once told me that if it happened again he would poor the entire beer over my head.  He did not claim to be joking until after I started crying and my mother, in a rare show of valor, chastised him.   I cried when he used to drag my older brother and me up the carpeted steps by one arm, causing rug burns.  Then I cried when he would beat us.  Often times, he would make us give him hugs, kiss him and tell him how much we loved him after the fact.  I supposed it was to make him feel better about abusing his children.  Fear was the name I knew my father by and it did not stop at him.  I began to associate all men with trepidation.  And on the rare occasions when we were allowed to visit my mother’s parents, I can recall being so afraid of my grandfather I would never talk in front of him for fear of being ridiculed.

When I was 5, my father left and then I cried because he was gone.   I was “daddy’s little girl”, without a daddy.  I would throw myself on the bed in my grandmother’s spare room and wail until I had nothing left to give but dry sobs.  My mother never said anything, but I know now how much it hurt her that she could not heal my pain. 

She started nursing school so she could support her three children.  I suffered terribly from separation anxiety and cried every time she left.  Then I cried because we had to spend our days with a grandmother who was, at the time, the single most terrifying person in my then very small world.  She introduced a concept, which we were not at all familiar with, discipline, and that was worse than being beaten by my father.

Early on, I used to cry at school for almost any reason.  I would cry if I thought someone didn’t like me, if my team lost while playing sports, or if I failed to finish my homework on time.  In the first grade I can remember my teacher crying at me in frustration, because she had no idea how to make me stop.  But she liked me, all of my teachers did.  And I find myself now wondering if they knew my tears represented so much more than what I claimed.

At night I would lie in bed and cry.  Sometimes it was because I was worried about my mom dying and leaving me alone.  Other times it was over more trivial things like what I would do if I were to outgrow all my clothes and then have nothing to wear to the store to buy new ones.  Once my mother discovered me in the kitchen where I was drying dishes and crying, that time it was because Han Solo had been frozen in carbonite and had been taken away by the bounty hunter Boba Fett.

When I was 9 my mother remarried.  I cried because I didn’t like him.   I would spend the next four years crying.  Crying because I hated the way he looked at me, the way he would ridicule and humiliate my brothers.  Crying because I was made to take showers

with him, because he was allowed to touch me and I cried because my mother who was the only person I had, would not or could not, make him stop.  I cried because I believed my grandparents knew and yet did nothing.  I used to cry because we had to spend our summers cleaning out the basement of his cockroach-infested house.  We would claim that he did not want us to play and have fun like normal children, but that is what all kids say about their parents.  I tried to run away from home a few times, but I would always return, crying because I was afraid of hurting my mother.

When I was 13 my mom told me they were getting a divorce and I cried for her.  I cried when she asked me to testify against him.  I cried at thought of having to look at him ever again.  We all cried when his family finally came out and told my mother that he had gotten his own daughter pregnant when she was 16 years old.  I cried because they had chosen to keep this from us.  Later I would cry because I had not testified and knew he was again free to do this to other young girls.

In junior high, I had incredibly low self-esteem and my classmates knew it.  I was like a dying animal in the desert and they were all vultures, picking endlessly at my open wounds.  A boy once told me that if he was as ugly as I was, he would commit suicide.   I went home and cried.  I cried because I felt ugly and because suicide felt like a good answer.  I cried because my mom had stopped asking if I was ok, stopped coming to talk to me when I spent days at a time shut away in my room.  She was afraid of what she had done to me, that she had hurt me enough and thought I just needed time to myself, time to heal.  And I cried because I couldn’t. 

It was a time of discovery, at least for those around me.  While others were experimenting with first kisses and discovering the opposite sex, I was crying because I had been used and knew far more than I had ever cared to.  While those around me had boyfriends, I would have been happy with someone who could have looked upon me without disgust.  Which was something even I could not do.  I used to cry and ask God to give me those things most kids take for granted.  I wanted a boyfriend; I wanted him to break my heart, just so I would know what it meant to feel like everyone else.  Never say God does not answer prayers.

My mother married again when I was 14.  This time I had decided I did not care enough to bother with crying. He had three children and we cared little for each other, though we were all very close in age.  We were not at all like the Brady Bunch.  We were given a book of very strict rules that when not followed, yielded a punishment of writing that book, a task which took some 4 hours.  We spent a lot of time writing.  We were not allowed to have friends outside the home; this interfered with the merging of our two families.  Talking on the phone, watching too much TV, or talking to boys were all strictly prohibited.  These ultimately lead to the demise of our patchwork family. 

My stepfather once caught his daughter and me talking to two guys outside our front yard and lectured us for the better part of an hour about the sins of the opposite sex.  When he suggested we were "loose", I looked to my mother for my defense.  She responded only by turning her back on me.  The night we ran away from home, I slept with a 19-year-old I had known for less than 2 hours.  Later my mother would cry and tell me that he had used me.  Through my tears, I explained that I had used him to get back at her.    

I never really came back home, but lived with friends as I continued to see the 19-year-old.  My first love.  The substitute for the father I had never really had.  The relationship would mirror everything bad in all three of my mother’s marriages, and I would cry because I, like my mother had failed.  There was abuse, though not in the beginning.  And I cried because I allowed myself to believe I deserved it.

I was 16 when I got pregnant and I cried because my entire life was going to change and no one understood my pain, least of all the father.  The abuse continued and I often wished he would cause me to miscarry, not because I did not want the baby, but because I thought he might then feel badly about how he had treated me.  But he was not capable of remorse and he never would be.  He told me once that if he found out the baby was a girl he would push me down the stairs to get rid of it.  When she was born, I cried because I was afraid I had disappointed him.

She had colic and I cried because I was tired and didn’t have any help.  He would yell at me and tell me to get the fuck out of the house and take her so he could get some sleep.  I cried because this was the life I had chosen and now my daughter would pay for it.  We were together for 3 years and I spent the last one hating him more and more every day.  I used to wish he would die while drinking and driving, one of his favorite past times.  But he never did, and I cried because I was too pathetic to leave him.

When I was 18 he kicked me out at 3 in the morning in a drunken rage.  Later he would ask me to come back, but I never did.  Of course, there was no discussion about with whom our little girl would be living; he did not want her if he could not have me.

I tried dating after that, but I was still not like anyone my age.  I would cry because my daughter, like me, would grow up fatherless and even though I had managed to finish high school, my dreams of college were far too unrealistic.  I cried as I listened to my friends’ talk about how they hated their classes and how they often skipped, wasting their parent’s money.  What I would not have given to be able to attend those same classes instead of working to support a little girl. 

At 19 I met and married a man.  He was beautiful and my family loved him.  I thought I could finally stop crying.  But after 5 short months he came to me and told me that he had a severe crack addiction and again I cried.  Naive as I was, I thought it was something I could help him get through, thought that if I just loved him, that would be enough, that love would conquer all.  I had never known an addict, an alcoholic, yes, but not a real drug addict.

I spent nights sobbing until my insides hurt and my face ached.  Nights alone, wondering if he was ever going to come home.  He would steal from me and hock things we were only renting.  He would disappear for days at a time, leaving me without my car and bills that I could not pay.   My daughter, now 4, grew accustomed to my tears and would hug me and ask what he had done this time.  Through all this, my biggest fear was that he would leave me and I knew that I could not handle his rejection.  So I left him.  Two years after our wedding, I was signing divorce papers and crying.  Again I had failed.  Failed at love, failed my daughter, failed at life.  I was a failure.

I once asked my mother if she thought divorce was an inherited trait.  She laughed softly, but painfully.  I spent the next 2 years alone, just my daughter and me.  And I did cry, but only privately.  I forbade my daughter from using his name as it only caused me pain, and by doing so, I took away her only expression of grief.  For that I have cried.  I was severely depressed, slept a lot and neglected normal chores around our tiny apartment.  Mold often grew on the unwashed dishes in the sink.  I was afraid to start over again, afraid of being hurt, afraid of failure.  I cried because I was alone and was afraid my cynicism was likely to keep me that way.

Eventually I started taking a few classes at a local community college about the time my daughter started kindergarten.  We spent a lot of time together, watched a lot of movies.  My grandmother would say I used them as an escape from my life, my pain.  But it was cheaper than smoking crack. 

My daughter came home from school one day and announced that I really needed a man.  Amused, I asked her what I needed one of those for and after some thought she informed me that he could clean the cat box.  I cried because the love I felt for her went so far beyond anything I had ever known and I ached to give her what I had never had.

A few years later and a little wiser, I still cry but for reasons far different from what they once were.  I cried on my wedding night, lying my husband’s arms with the prospect of being truly happy.  I have cried while watching him dote on my daughter and seeing the love for her in his eyes.  I cried when I found out I was pregnant and when my second daughter was born.  I cried when he adopted my older daughter and gave her more than his last name, gave her what I could have never given her; the unconditional love of a father.  I have cried because I have finally found someone who is capable of loving as passionately as I.  And at night while he sleeps, I cry because I am afraid that some day I may lose them all.  For happiness has never been a lasting entity in my life.