Tears on my pillow

I woke up around 2:30 this morning crying. No, not crying – sobbing. I don’t recall what I was dreaming about, but I had tears streaming down my cheeks and it took quite a few minutes to stop crying.

I’ve always been a crier. Even before puberty messed with my hormones, I was a crier. I’m a bit of a perfectionist (I know, “what’s new?”), so when something I know I can do goes wrong, I get very frustrated. I remember one afternoon when I was 10 or 11 I was practicing the piano and even though I knew the piece I was playing, I couldn’t get it right. I stopped mid-measure, pounded on the keys and sobbed for 10 minutes. After not making the cut for a high-school musical, I approached the drama teacher and asked what I could work on so that I could possibly be in the next production. I asked for constructive criticism and still cried. If a person is crying in a face-to-face conversation with me, I’ll start crying, too. And sappy movies – don’t get me started. Even not-so-sappy movies; I cry every time at the end of 50 First Dates when she meets her daughter again for the first time. For the most part I can control my tears until there’s a more appropriate place to let loose, like inside my car. I don’t mind crying, I just hate crying in front of other people. I always feel better when I cry, but I’ll cry harder if I try to stop before my body’s done ridding itself of the frustration/anger/sadness/stress it’s feeling.

I’m generally a happy person.  But lately I’ve been crying more often than usual. I cried Saturday afternoon, I cried Saturday night – twice. I cried in church on Sunday, I cried Sunday afternoon. Even characters crying in re-runs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer make me cry. Not just wet eyes – tears running down my cheeks. And they don’t seem to be stopping any time soon. My tears are many times just my way of getting angry – angry at you, angry at me, angry at unsolvable problems and stressful situations. I’ve had a lot of stressful situations lately, so it makes sense that I would be crying a lot. But the majority of my problems are over, and the one that still hanging around shouldn’t make me cry as much as it should. I’m done with my legal crap with my ex over custody of and visitation with our daughter. I’m done changing banks and not having access to my money for a few days (which seemed like weeks). I’m done stressing over whether or not my ex would actually show up for his visitation with our daughter. The only thing that’s left is my apartment hunt. Which is stressful. Especially with people constantly asking how it’s going. At this point I’m feeling like a woman who’s trying to get pregnant, but isn’t yet. You don’t ask how the baby-making is going, and when she finally gets pregnant, she’ll tell you. Trust me, if I’d found an apartment, I’d have told the ENTIRE world! It’s a stressful up-down process and I have sympathy for anyone trying to find an apartment in Orange County. They come-and-go on the market faster than free cookies in my office.

What worries me most about my propensity for crying is my daughter. She seems to have started earlier than I ever did. She’s 6, but her tears started before she was 5 ½ . Something changed when she was visiting her dad last summer and from the moment she got home, she had instant tears whenever something didn’t go the way she’d planned or we asked her to do something she didn’t want to do (I know, I know. Kids. Welcome to life), or she did something incorrectly the first time she tried it (she’s bright, and a perfectionist like me, so she expects herself to be great at everything). She’s learning to control it as well, and is even able to tell people, “Excuse me. I need a minute” while she composes herself. She gets very upset when she feels the tears coming on, and of course that makes it worse. But she’s getting the hang of it.

Which is more than I can say for myself.

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