Who Are You To Cry?

As the tears ran down my sister's face on Sunday night I couldn't make out the words she was blubbering. It was hopeless. It was just noise that was leaving her lips and red that was building in her cheeks. Something about being left out and wanting to play with the Barbie she wanted to play with. I knew in the back of my mind that if my sister were given the Barbie that she wanted, the tears on her face would magically vanish and no one would have known that she had been crying only seconds before.

I think a lot about the little things that change us... The moments that we lose our innocence and the times that we realize everything in life isn't perfect. For some reason I keep returning to the concept of crying, and I'm starting to believe that it is the one thing that really signals our growing up.

When Finding Nemo was in the theatre I went to go see it with my mother and my sisters. I was still young, still under the impression that everything in life is perfect and that nothing could ever go wrong. The simple image of a shark scared me more than the fact that it killed Nemo's mother and all his siblings.

I remember the moment in the movie where Nemo is hurt, and Marvin, Nemo's dad, picks him up and holds him. He says over and over the thing he said when he found Nemo was the only fish the shark in the beginning of the movie did not kill. Marvin holds Nemo in his small egg and says that he wouldn't let anything ever hurt him. But there he is holding Nemo, and he knows that he hasn't kept his promise.

At the time, I didn't understand what was so hard about this scene, but mother did. At this point in the movie I was frustrated that I was there seeing it. It had a scary shark and had emotional moments that I simply wasn't ready to handle yet! So I turned to my mother to complain, and notice that she's crying.

So many questions ran threw my mind... Why wasn't she kicking and screaming? Isn't that what happens when you cry? And why was she crying? She's an adult! Adults don't cry. She's a mommy. Mommy's don't... cry.

I associated crying with babies. I would look at a baby and anticipate them crying. Isn't that what babies do? I was little... I cried. I knew that my sisters cried and I knew that other little kids cried but mommy's? Mommys just don't cry.

It was then that I was exposed to the truth. Crying was a complex emotion that changes as a person grows up. It changes from crying because you're hungry and don't know how to say it, to crying because someone took your Barbie, to crying because life isn't fair and everything is annoying, to crying because an intense feeling from a movie hit you.

I'll never forget the feeling I had in the movie theatre... Being so excited to have my first crying experience. I knew then that if I cried in a movie, it would be a symbol that I was growing up. That I, Audrey Bachman, was mature enough to understand grown up things in a movie and then have a grown up response. My destination from that point on was to cry during a movie, and not even have to try to do it. To just... cry.

All of a sudden it became immature to cry because you wanted something. But it became mature to cry for a much more sophisticated reason.

NOW. How on Earth does this relate to my coming of age book? I will tell you.

The Little Prince is a small book about a man whose plane crashes and lands in a strange world and greeted by a little prince. Together they go on small adventures and share opinions on life and adults and children. The little prince reminds me of Peter Pan in the sense that it seems like he will never grow up. As we know though, everyone must grow up. So I have come to the conclusion that when the little prince grows up he will still have the same opinions as he does now, that children are far more wiser and more interesting than adults.

The little prince and our unnamed explorer meet a switchman at a certain point in their story and what started out to be a casual conversation turned into something that made me want to write all over the page in my book. (I'm sorry, please forgive me. I just had to.)

Below is the section that got me thinking on crying and what about it symbolizes growing up:

"They're not chasing anything," the switchman said. They're sleeping in there, or else they're yawning. Only the children are pressing their noses against the windowpanes."

"Only the children know that they're looking for," said the little prince. "They spend their time on a rag doll and it becomes very important, and if it's taken away from them, they cry . . ."

"They're lucky," the switchman said.

This got me thinking about crying in general... Later I got to my bigger thoughts about maturing crying and immature crying, but in that moment I thought about something else. Something that was vaguely mentioned in the beginning my post.

I thought about what the little prince said... About how all children do when something happens that they don't want is they cry. That's all they can do, that's all they know how to do. But it's not the fact that they can't physically do anything else, it's the fact that the answer to something bad happening is to cry about it.

When something happens that triggers tears for an adult, the two things you can do are going out and fixing it, or moping around and sulking. Like my sister on Sunday night: Once she got what she wanted the tears went away and no one would have known that she had been crying.

When adults cry, something hangs over them. Some kind of gray cloud follows them around all day. I'll never forget that not only could I look at my mother in the same way after I saw her crying, but she looked different physically for a while after the movie, too. Like someone had touched her heart in side the walls of the movie theatre.

No one saw it coming, my mom didn't know the movie would be that tear jerking and I didn't know that by entering the building of the theatre I would lose a little bit of innocence. I would soon learn that adults cry, and that there's more to scary sharks then jus their scary looks.

I didn't know that an animated fish could make a person cry, especially a grown up. A big person.

In Stand By Me, Gordie realizes that he didn't cry at his brother's funeral. Gordie feels like a bad person, a failure, because of other complex feelings, but it all leads up to his regret of not crying during a funeral. Then and only then, does Gordie cry.

Gordie isn't crying because the toy he wanted to play with got taken away. Gordie is crying because in that moment he hates himself and he hates the world. He is angry and sad and frustrated. Helpless.

A baby isn't helpless when they cry... I like to believe that the only reason that child cries is in hope that they will get the attention of some one and that person can get them what they want.

Gordie isn't asking for anything. He's just feeling emotion. My mother wasn't crying because she wanted something. She was crying because a feeling was filling up inside her. A feeling more than just wanting to be heard.

So in some ways kids do have it easier. All they have to do to get what they want is to open their mouth and scream. Let the tears fall down their cheeks. But my mom took something that day when we watched Finding Nemo. Crying gave her the sensation of feeling life and the unfairness that comes with it. So maybe when it comes to crying adults have it easier... Because all babies take from crying is a soar throat.

My mom left the movie theater that day with a memory. And I left with an image that I would try to live up to until I could have my own experience with crying because I was really feeling.