Nothing’s Wrong.

When I was younger, I hated watching people cry. Sometimes my mom would cry when she got real frustrated with her children’s behavior and all three of us would sit there feeling completely awkward, not knowing what to say. It was probably her best tactic.

I also hated testimony meetings at church and girl’s camp because someone was bound to cry. I knew who the criers were and when they stood up I would get a little tense because I knew what was coming.

For awhile I stayed away from movies that made people cry and music that made people cry. I stuck to the stuff that was void of any kind of sentiment – partly because I thought a lot of the sentimental stuff was phony and manipulated, but also because I didn’t exactly know how to respond. I understood crying if your brother pushed you or you fell off your bike, but if your tears were a result of something touchy-feely, I felt a little helpless.

As I got older sentiment didn’t bother me so much. I started to allow myself to cry more. I didn’t mind books that made me cry or music that made me cry. Maybe you get to a point where you need an outlet of some sort, and if it’s misdirected, so what? I could cry over the stupidest things even though the worst thing that happened to me that day was I got a B on a math test. I will never join the ranks of those people who get up every month for Fast and Testimony meeting and start to cry before they get a word out, but I suppose I became somewhat of a “crier.”

A couple years ago I was home all by myself and I popped in the movie “Once.” When it was over I sat there and cried for a good 10 minutes. Not just tears, SOBS. It was ridiculous. I don’t think I identified directly with any of the characters, I just felt like crying, and so I did – all through the credits.

There’s an Everybody Loves Raymond episode (of course there is, there’s one for everything – it’s almost like Seinfeld that way) where Deborah gets the house to herself for the morning. Ray decides to spy on her because he’s curious as to what she plans to do. He peeks through the window at one point and sees her sitting on the couch, crying with a box of Kleenex and she’s not even watching TV or anything. Of course he gets all worried.

Sometimes it takes awhile for me to cry about something because I’m just so busy that I don’t have time. Last week I stopped by Albertsons after work. As is often the case, I chose the wrong check out line and ended up waiting for a long time. Because I had nothing else to do I thought about a conversation I had with a friend the night before. He told me a lot of things, some of which kind of made me feel bad. It was actually a good conversation and I bore it like a champ, but hadn’t really had time to think about it until that moment in the check out line. So I stood there, holding my chocolate milk and all-purpose flour, on the verge of tears. I looked up and saw the bagger kind of lean to the side so he could get a better glimpse of me as he tried to figure out what was wrong. Poor guy – he looked so concerned. Nothing’s wrong, really. Seriously, don’t worry about it.