In the daunting world of the school playground, crying symbolized weakness. As a respected team member on the recess kickball and soccer teams, I feared executing the calamitous mistake of crying when a ball collided with my face. Hearing the ring of the afternoon recess bell, my friends and I sprinted onto the welcoming soccer field. Sweat poured down my face, and the wind blew strongly against my forehead. I felt a rush of adrenaline as I focused on the flying black and white ball travel across the grassy field. The wind carried my teammate’s shouts. After diving for a soccer ball and scraping my knee, I brushed the dirt off my tattered jeans, retied my hair into a sleek ponytail, and held back the stinging tears of pain. My eight-year-old self believed that resilience, not tears, signaled strength and earned respect from peers. In fact, I distinctly remember my younger sister and me curling up on the couch to watch a movie on a Saturday night. During a particularly melancholic moment, my sister violently shook me. She whispered in her trembling eight-year-old voice, “You’re not crying?” Her sobbing eyes glimpsed my quick shrug. However, I felt uneasy about my unwillingness to cry during the scene, and the nagging thought distracted me from enjoying the final parts of the movie. Later, my sister’s conclusion that I was “cold-hearted” disturbed me the most.

My perspective on crying has undoubtedly changed.

This summer, I volunteered at a summer culture camp. During morning care, I entertained and supervised little campers before the day started. Each morning, I baby-sat two bouncy six-year-old girls. Every day, they chose a picture book for me to read with them. One morning, after their usual negotiations and arguments, they finally agreed on reading Love You Forever, a short picture book written by Robert N. Munsch. The hazy recollection of my mother reading it to me sparked my excitement. As the words on the first page slipped off my tongue, I imagined myself in bed, riveted while listening to my mother unravel the story of a mother’s unconditional love for her child. In Love You Forever, a young woman cradles her newborn son every night and sings a lullaby, promising to love him forever. As the baby boy grows up, she continues to croon the customary lullaby every night while cradling her son. Even when the son grows into a man and leaves home, the elderly mother sneaks into his bedroom at night to sing the lullaby. Inevitably, the mother becomes old and feeble. However, this time, the son visits and cradles his frail mother in his arms for the final time and sings the lullaby as he vows to love his mother forever. Following the death of the mother, the man walks into his baby daughter’s bedroom and sings the lullaby for his baby, thus continuing the cycle. “I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always; as long as I'm living, my baby you'll be,” I sang as my eyes glazed over the words on the final page of the book. The two girls widened their shining eyes as I repeated the lullaby in the same tune my mother had sung when she first introduced the book to me. The girls looked sympathetically at me and declared earnestly, “Don’t worry. Everything will be okay!” We exchanged roles for a transient moment as the girls stood up to dry the flow of tears trailing down my cheeks; I realized I was crying.

The prevalent belief about crying is that humans shed tears more frequently at a young age, and as they mature, they gradually learn to conceal their tears. However, the opposite has happened to me. Now, I do not view crying as an indication of weakness, and I more easily allow myself to cry. The two six-year-old girls might not have understood why I wept at the end of Love You Forever because tears for them come from a broken slinky or a confiscated toy. However, my tears that day stemmed from my fond recollections of my mother reading that book to me. The experiences, people, and possessions that move me to tears divulge the matters I truly care about and who I am. Family exists as a central part of my life, and the love I feel for my mother trumps every other emotion. Tears, a simple response to an emotion, serve as a tool of self-discovery. We endeavor to appear hardy, but we will always remain human. As Charles Dickens, a famous British author, writes in his novel Great Expectations, “We need never be ashamed of our tears.”