Jovie, 12, is running cross country for her school this year. During yesterday’s meet she ran with a good friend, the two of them pushing keeping pace and urging each other to keep running when they felt like walking. Jovie crossed the finish line heaving, dripping sweat and red faced. Proud that she’d cut 40 seconds off her previous run. Her friend looked a bit more pained. Her eyebrows furrowed and her face pinched as she struggled to catch her breath. Her parents collected her and coached her through her cool down. I’m not a runner, but I empathized, recalling the way my legs and lungs cried out when sprinting down a soccer field decades ago. Or how my whole body felt after crossing the finishing lines of the handful of 5Ks I’d run: like a crushed soda can.
The girls race was fast; the runners were determined and strong, despite the sun beating down and the unseasonable humidity. After the race, we were walking behind a group of boys who’d run the first race of the day. “Why do the girls always look like they’re going to cry after a race?” One asked. Another joined in- “yeah, they get so emotional.” I didn’t catch the whole exchange, but the tone was more mocking than curious. The subtext was clear: this crying the girls did was a weakness. A fault. It was embarrassing.
Listening to the boys stood my hackles on end and fired up my cheeks. It was as if I was 12 again and flashing through all the basketball game in P.E. when the boys refused to pass me the ball and every kickball game where I was sidelined among the begrudged last picks- almost always all girls. Their message was clear to me: I wasn’t athletic enough. Not strong enough. Not fast enough. Not good enough. That story about me seeped into my bones for a long time. It wasn’t until college and after that I rewrote it while playing pickup games of ultimate frisbee, joining a mom’s league soccer team, and practicing yoga. I can hold my own when I’m having fun.
Still, when I heard these boys in their cocksure voices judging their teammates’ tears, my inner 12 year old wanted to pick a fight. How dare they. Of course those girls had tears in their eyes. They ran hard. They pushed their muscles to their limit. They found the edges of their will power, their perseverance, their strength, their physical ability. Those moments leave a person with big feelings. Of course their bodies cried out. I sucked my lips between my teeth and bit down to stop myself from launching into a rant they weren’t ready to hear from a strange middle aged mom.
I gave myself time to cool down and reflect. It’s not as if the boys were without emotion upon finishing their races. In fact, there were plenty of boys who looked like they could’ve been close to tears at the end of their race. It’s hard to know with all the gasping for air and the sweat. Frankly, everyone sort of looks like they’ve been bawling at the end of a race – minus the snot and red eyes. I wondered if maybe, just like the girls, the boys might have needed to cry- maybe they needed a place to release all the adrenaline and nerves and physical exertion- but they’d been taught not to cry. Because crying is seen as weak. And to appear weak as a boy is a threat to their survival in the social hierarchy. Doubly so in middle school.
Society is not comfortable with a crying boy. Even in 2024. Especially in 2024. Look at how Tim Walz’s son was received after his dad’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. A crying boy not only reflects on the character of that boy, but is dangerous to the society that accepts his tears. We continue to believe that a boy crying (like a girl) makes the rest of us look weak. It is messaging that feels baked into our genetics. This is not just sad, it’s devastating.
As I’ve covered in this space for years, I cry all the time. I cried talking to a terrified kitten at the animal shelter who was choosing to curl up in the litter box scoop inside the litter box because that seemed to be the safest space in her enclosure. I cried listening to “No Children” by the Mountain Goats on my way to the gas station. I cried reading stories about flooding in the wake of Hurricane Helene. I nearly cried at the mall today because I was so overloaded by all the people and the noises and the smells. I used to be embarrassed by what I assumed must have been some faulty wiring between my brain, throat, and eyes because clearly only a broken person would be this sensitive. All. The. Time. But I’ve decided to make peace with my tears. They are rarely without reason. They are always cleansing. They help me find the tender spots.
One of my sisters texted me one of those Facebook photo compilations of the day Annie was born. In it, there are pictures of me between contractions goofing around with Brad and my sisters. And there are shots of me holding Annie for the first time- her dark hair all sticky with afterbirth. “Mom, were you crying in the picture?” Jovie asked me as we scrolled through them. “Are you crying now?!” she asked glancing over at me. It was a yes to both. There are a lot of hormones involved with giving birth I told Jovie. And the laboring. And the exhaustion. And then finally gazing on this tiny human who I’d been imagining about for 9 months. It’s emotional. I told her. How could anybody not cry?
It occurs to me now that crying is one of our first acts of being human upon emerging from the womb. Crying is what allows us to take our first breaths. And for a mother in labor, crying out is built into the force needed to push life into the world. So that this baby can open her mouth and breathe the oxygen she needs to survive. The two of us crying together – mother and child – that’s our first act together. We need each other. We are sealed in those tears. They are sacred.
It is the most human thing we do. Which is why it is devastating that we judge boys who cry. In doing so, we are denying their humanity. We are telling them to squash a very human need in the moments when they most need to express it. And the wreckage this causes a human – is it much different from denying an exhausted person rest? A starving person food? A thirsty person water? I think all we need to do is look around at the existential crisis facing our country to see that it’s not.
The Washington Post invited five writers from around the country to find out how the election is affecting their local communities. I read former Philadelphia Inquirer columnist John Grogan’s portion on Pennsylvania with interest- having lived there for so much of my young adult life. In it, he shares he struggled to have any conversations with Lehigh Valley residents who were dubious of his working for “the mainstream media.” He was invited into the home of a couple in their 70s with a “Take America Back Again” banner in the yard. The woman who lived there shared the banner belonged to her son who lived with them and that maybe Grogan should talk to him. When her son walked in the room and found out who he wrote for, he refused to be interviewed: “I don’t talk to communists!” he shouted after calling The Washington Post “fake news” and “a communist rag.”
Grogan described how he continued the conversation with the woman realizing he knew of her already, as she’d worked in the community as an active old-school Republican for years. The woman knew of Grogan from his time at the Inquirer. Despite their different viewpoints, Grogan felt a small neighborly bond before the woman’s son returned. He described what happened next:
“At that moment, the son returned, this time visibly more agitated. ‘I have heard enough.’ His voice was loud, aggressive, brimming with rage. ‘Out of our house! No communist rags. Get out!’ His mother was on her feet, pleading. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘We were just — ‘
‘You have 30 seconds to get out of this house!’ he shouted, and I knew to take him at his word. I had heard this voice before.
‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving,’ I said.
‘No, no,’ the mother said.
‘Get out!’ the son said.
I wanted to learn more from him. Why was he so angry? But a conversation was impossible.
I’m not in the habit of touching women I have just met, but as I squeezed past the mother to the door, I placed my hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s okay,’ I said, even as her son continued to bellow. ‘You take good care.’ I wanted her to know I understood.”
This story sticks with me. The mother’s pleading over her son’s rage. That put a knot in my throat. That felt familiar. But the man’s screaming. His anger. That to me was on the same spectrum as those boys asking why the girls cried at the end of the race. “How is it that they’re allowed this human act when we are not?” I wondered if under that rage is fear. And I wondered what that fear was about. And if only he could talk about it: The anger, but more importantly the fear. Then we could all get somewhere, right? If you can name the thing you are afraid of. Look it in the face. That lessens some of its power.
But he couldn’t talk to the thing he feared. He could only raise his voice and force the thing from his home.
This man raging at a stranger as his mom pleads “no” – that is someone who has been denied his humanity. Who has not been allowed to process his world in the glorious rainbow of emotions we were gifted at birth. So he has a limited set of survival tools. Rage feels like the sharpest knife. The biggest club. The gun that reloads the quickest.
That person is the one I try to keep front and center right now. In the moments when I feel most self-righteous and frustrated about where we go next. In the moments I want to unload my feminist ire on a group of unsuspecting middle schoolers. It’s that we are all reacting to what we feel is an existential threat. At the root of that is just a bunch of scared little humans. And if we strip that down further, just a bunch of humans. Just trying to preserve our humanity in a world ripe with adversity and pain. If w could just allow ourselves the opportunity to say we are afraid. Or lonely. Or sad. Or whatever the case may be. To say that we don’t feel as if this country has a place for us anymore, and that is scary. Then we can take the first step out of the hole.
Imagine the impact. How these small waves would ripple. Maybe it doesn’t solve all the upset in this moment. But with our children watching, it could save future generations some pain down the road.
One of my neighbors posted a picture from the cross country meet. In it is a line of girls from Jovie’s team, including Jovie, clapping. Here’s what the caption said:
“I was watching the end of the boys race and there were a lot of kids struggling to make it to the finish line. All of the sudden there was a ton of cheering behind me and when I turned around, it was the entire HMS girls cross country team cheering for every single one of those boys. It didn’t matter if they were from Herndon or another school. They were there to give them that last boost of confidence to get over the finish line. It was a simple but amazing thing to witness!”
My guess is that girls would’ve cheered for the boys no matter how they showed up at the finish line. If any of those boys had been crying, they would’ve understood. We need each other to celebrate the victories and carry each other through the losses.
I don’t know if it’s the overcast weather or the change in routines or the ongoing feeling of worry about the future, but I’ve been feeling low the past couple weeks. All murky and sad. The other night, in an effort to shake off some of the heaviness, I opened up this book of poetry I picked up over the summer: “Love Poems from God” and I found one from Rumi called “That Lives in Us” that held me. Here’s an excerpt:
If you put your soul against this oar with me,
the power that made the universe will enter your sinew
from a source not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm
that lives in us.
Exuberant is existence, time a husk.
When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space;
love goes mad with the blessings, like my word give.
Why lay yourself on the torturer's rack of the past and future?
The mind that tires to shape tomorrow beyond its capacities
will find no rest.
Be kind to yourself, dear- to our innocent follies.
Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance.
You will come to see that all evolves us.
I love those last two verses: “Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance. You will come to see that all evolves us.”