Crying In Our Cars

Can we show our emotional selves to our children?

It started at the grocery store. I hadn't planned to go there, but the bodega hadn't opened for the day, and so a quick pop-out for milk turned into a disorienting, be-gloved mad-dash at one of America's many dumbass-sized supermarkets. 

Maybe it was the accidental graduation balloon I bought for my two-year-old's birthday, something that would have been ironic and funny two months ago but now seemed emblematic of the makeshift, lonely celebration we were planning. Or maybe it was later, my son delivering a skin-breaking bite when I tried to get him to wash his hands. A well-meaning passerby offering unsolicited parenting advice as we bickered on the sidewalk. 

Wherever it started, it ended in my driveway. Me, sobbing in my parked sedan, uncontrollably.

I am not the only parent I know who has taken to crying in their car these days. One friend does it in her bathroom (she has more than one). I imagine my more urban compatriots are finding shower stalls to lose their shit in, or simply draping a sheet over their heads and crumpling into a ball on the floor, hoping they will be mistaken for more dirty laundry. 

As someone who experiences vast emotional see-saws, and has a history of depression and anxiety, I have long worried about how my moods effect my children. After having my first child, I wrote in this piece that “some small part of me is always terrified that I will model emotional volatility, that I passed it on already in the womb, that my depression is a burden that I have inflicted on my kiddo."

Covid street art in my neighborhood

Many of us remember a seminal time from our childhood when we saw our parents cry. This was an illicit moment, like Toto pulling back the curtain on the Great and Powerful Oz, discombobulating and fleeting. I've learned since then, through my work, that showing our emotions to our children can not only be un-horrible, it can actually be beneficial to them. This lovely, compassionate article explains it well (and also reminds us of the “Still Face” experiment, which is up there with the Strange Situation as one of the top 10 all-time creepiest-experiments-done-with-children). On the one hand, we try not to overload our children or make them feel that our feelings are their responsibility. On the other hand, hiding our difficult emotions is stressful for children, who are the true all-powerful Ozes and see right through our bullshit. The sweet middle ground is a place where we show children a reasonable amount of what we’re feeling before it gets too big, tell them it’s not their fault, and lead by example by taking care of ourselves in some way.

But what about now? What if your feelings are connected to a real and constant threat? A lack of shelter or employment? An illness or death? A daily swamp-butt sludge of uncertainty and danger? For parents, stuck in our small spaces with our small (or big) children, juggling work, the news feed, and our jealousy at the boredom of others, volatility has become the new normal. 

In my brilliant sister-in-law Kate Cortesi's play Love, which I watched a few weeks ago as part of a virtual theater night, a man who has had many secret sexual relationships with his employees processes the idea of his son finding out about them. "If I show myself to (him)," he says, “if I really show myself, he won’t love me." Can we get through this without showing ourselves to our children? What will it cost us if we can't? If we can? Others are showing themselves to our children all the time, whether we like it or not. The friend discussing a dead relative on FaceTime. The grandparent that chokes up while reading “I Love You Forever” on Zoom.

When I came back inside from the car cry, I told my children what I'd done. If you weren't convinced that they track literally everything in their own weird ways, you should know that my son had declared in my absence that "mommy went to light herself on fire and die." Not far off, little one.

I decided to be small and concrete. I did not mention the lack of federal leadership that is keeping me up at night.  I said, "I'm glad I cried 'cause it made me feel better. Sometimes my battery gets empty when I am taking you on a walk, and trying to keep us safe from germs, and you guys are having a hard time listening. It felt better to take some space and cry. I’m going to be okay and I love you. " My daughter said "it okay crying in the car Mama!" My son said he had a special reward for me that would make me happy, which turned out to be reading him a story (See what he did there? Evil geniuses, all of them). 

Encouragement from a sidewalk fairy

Did I fuck them up by showing them how hard being their mother can be, and how scary this time is? Did I proactively unfuck them by giving them a model for feeling bad, releasing constructively, and repairing? I have no idea, and I have a feeling that that study will never be conducted (even when their deficiencies start to reveal themselves, as the old adage says, correlation does not equal causation). 

Back in the car, six tissues in, my gentle, avuncular neighbor of a million years gracefully tried to roll his garbage bins past my snot-filled sob-fest. "It's just so hard to put on a good face all day for them," I told him. "Yes" he replied, in his slow, thoughtful way. “And maybe the lesson is, you don't have to."