Yet Another Old Writing

Probably also from the mid-1980's:

I cannot cry unless I expressly give myself permission. When I feel a lump in my throat, I must choose whether or not to cry. Sometimes I give myself permission to cry, and sometimes I don't. Usually the times I deny myself tears are reasonable postponements. If I'm singing at the funeral of a relative, for example, I can't cry and sing at the same time, so the tears get postponed.

But often there's no real reason why I shouldn't cry, and yet the tears hover unshed in my throat until I give them permission to come, and sometimes they don't even come then. It seems to me that my difficulty in crying has to do with my father. He and I argued a lot when I was in my early teens. I would get so angry and frustrated at his stubborn wrong-headedness that I would begin to cry. Then he would tell me to stop crying, saying that I was using tears as a way to manipulate him.

So I learned to control my tears. Not in the way he meant, to turn them on at will, but to be able to withhold them until the coast was clear and I could cry in private. To this day I cannot cry until after I have decided that it is safe for my tears to come out, and maybe not even then.