By John Van Wagner
Soon after my son turned eleven, in the hours before a crucial travel baseball game, he asked me if I ever cried.
What a question. Especially on Saturday morning at Dunkin’ Donuts with its riot of cream filled creations for every celebration, a place where no one’s ever cried. It’s hard to be sad around chocolate-dipped French crullers.
And Robert wasn’t sad, though his question was serious and intentional. I realized later that he’d given some thought about when to pose it. It was as if asking in public would force a certain level of paternal honesty. This was a test.
I wanted to say that of course I’ve cried, that everyone cries, and that there’s no shame in it. But I knew these were not the answers he sought, or even the most truthful ones. I hesitated, trying to seem distracted by the coffee rolls.
“Why?” I finally asked.
“Because I’ve never seen you. Cry.”
“Sure you have.”
“No, I haven’t.”
Right then we stepped up to order. But this was a temporary reprieve. Munchkins would only divert for so long.
He had me cornered. And he knew it. I could squirm and deflect all I wanted. It was futile. The truth was that he was right. And in this moment that fact made me feel like a defective father.
The American Psychological Association tells us that men cry 1.3 times a month and women 5.4. But how do they define crying? Assuming there is emission of moisture from the eyes without the presence of onions, the experience is a matter of degrees. There is weeping, there is sobbing, and there is blubbering. And there is the simple constriction of the throat, a tiny leakage without any real loss of composure.
So, which is it? What am I guilty of? Which negative by omission?
For the record, I have cried. And I mean the Full Monty. Surrender. A broken dam. Perhaps half a dozen times in my three decades of adult life. Maybe once or twice in public. Nowhere near the APA’s estimate. Each time was part trauma and part catharsis, like vomiting. It always made me feel lighter, as if I’d lost something nonessential, some weighty flotsam dissolved and flushed. There’s something elemental about tears. Their salinity evokes the endless scope of the ocean. At its most intense crying is like melting in an underwater volcanic eruption.
And it’s every bit as terrifying.
Of all the literary giants, Lewis Carroll understood best the power of tears to immolate. I’d read the original Alice to Robert several years before. He loved chapter two, “The Pool of Tears.” I found it perplexing. Down in the famous rabbit hole Alice loses all sense of herself in her quest to traverse a miniature door into an Edenic garden. Aided by a conveniently placed comestible and accompanying potion, she grows and shrinks in impossible ways that thwart her intense desire for release. Her confusion, the resultant tears, and the random transformation all suggest a metaphor for the sublime agony of puberty and the threat and promise of what comes after. There might even be some veiled reference in there to gender dysphoria, or whatever its incipient predecessor was in the nineteenth century. But Alice never quite goes there. Perhaps the concept of becoming a boy was just a psychic bridge too far, even in Wonderland. Or maybe Alice knew the burden of boys, that they live in their own phantasms, where crying equals death. Whatever the basis for the changes she undergoes, her profound shame emerges in her lament: “I shall be punished for it . . . by being drowned in my own tears.” Her loss of control has consequences, even though, as a girl, she has done nothing wrong.
I imagine second wave feminists have enshrined Alice as an avatar in the realm of female experience, forced to accept blame for her very nature. But in my thoughts about the chapter, I found within myself a vague envy for a child whose nature compels her, despite her resistance. For hers is a natural reaction, both an imperative and a privilege of her gender, and releases a powerful force of imagination. It cleanses. Alice emerges from her ordeal wide-eyed, curious, liberated, and ready for the next adventure. And, despite her resistance, society expects it of her. At least 5.4 times a month.
I wondered about those statistics again. The figure for women seemed reasonable, but 1.3 times a month for the average man? Was this self-reported? Or did they pay subjects to come into some crying lab for observation for a month, in which time almost any guy would break down at least once from pure boredom? But most would resist. Even in a controlled environment, it’s a spectacle.
A couple of months before Robert’s question, I’d encountered a friend whom I knew was struggling with prostate cancer. We had a casual bond, and we spoke of casual things—jobs, vacations, sports, the news. But when the conversation veered toward even the remotely personal—a missing cat, a beloved former teacher he’d visited after thirty years, the Red Sox recent loss to the Yankees (for him this was perhaps the most deeply personal)—he began to weep. He waved his hands in front of his face and excused himself. It was the estrogen therapy, a new line of oncological defense, less toxic than chemo. But apparently no less powerful.
I told him he owed me no explanation. But he offered one—and an apology—after each of the three or four times he succumbed during our exchange, breaching his monthly quota in the span of twenty minutes. Like the cancer itself it was something he couldn’t control. It was involuntary, he insisted, and it meant far less than what it implied.
I wasn’t so sure. I followed his lead and made light of it. But later it seemed to me that he was frightened, and that I should have offered more humanity, more comfort. Who knows. Hormonal overload may have been the most rational explanation for his loss of control, but crying is not a rational impulse. Even, and maybe especially, when it is driven by excess estrogen. Regardless of its genesis, at its most basic, it’s associated with life’s negatives—pain, shock, grief, fear, cancer—all the things we try to evade, unless we’re parents of newborns. In that case we have no choice but to confront. Our offspring teach us the true power of its mysteries.
Robert was a colicky baby. In those first few months of life, he offered up a master class in crying, all the varying decibels, cadences and rhythms which made it seem like a continuous choral composition from some very twisted, post—John Cage musician, ready to release his art on the world when it’s at its most vulnerable. Like at 3:10 in the morning, the way Robert did regularly for the better part of a year. In the course of reading about infants with this affliction, I learned about the primal purity of what my wife and I called the “Beavis scream,” after one of our favorite cartoon anti-heroes of the 90s. The aural composition of a newborn’s cry is engineered to slice through any built-in muffling mechanism, to reach the deepest inner sanctum of the parental cerebrum and compel action. It’s a plea for life.
As the years roll by, tears become more associated with death. My mother passed after a long and unpredictable illness right in the middle of the climactic tournament of Robert’s travel baseball career. After multiple unanswered phone calls, I made a high-speed drive from Cooperstown down to my childhood home, only to encounter the searing lights of police cars. Inside I found my mother in haphazard, rigorous repose, dead for a number of hours. In front of a phalanx of cops and EMS, I cried. The policewoman overseeing the scene recoiled from me as if from a leper, her stern, officious pose deflated. She stammered and averted her eyes, asking without the least bit of sympathy whether I was all right.
At Cooperstown the next morning, it fell to my wife to tell Robert. She drew him into the dugout of an unused field and held him while he sobbed. Inevitably, some coach or another happened by and peeked in. “Don’t worry, buddy,” he exclaimed. “You’ll win the next one.”
No crying in baseball. That’s the sacred dictum. Yet I’d seen crying multiple times among the child players. I often replay in my mind the sunny spring day when the relief pitcher on Robert’s team took the mound, promptly walked five batters, let go seven runs, and gave up a comfortable lead. Relaxed at first, his expression evolved from nonchalant to disgusted to resigned to frustrated to furious. He was a rangy kid, tall and flexible, but as things deteriorated his whole being turned flaccid and rubbery, his throws without any aim or purpose, until he dissolved into a paroxysm of sobs and was hurried off the field by the coach. His mother, a psychologist at the nearby college, watched helplessly as she kept a phone appointment with a patient. Robert had to step in to finish out the inning, which he did, without further drama.
No one spoke. But everyone saw. These boys (and they were all boys, despite the lack of formal barriers to female participation), were stand-ins for soldiers on a battlefield. Those who cried were the casualties. They might as well be girls. Those who didn’t survived. They would continue on the journey to manhood.
When Harrison Butker, placekicker extraordinaire for the Kansas City Chiefs, recently entered the culture wars with his encomium to his wife for her embrace of marriage and motherhood, he betrayed moisture in the cracks of his eyes and a crack in his baritone voice. No one mocked him. The public swallowed its discomfort. The political right offered applause and the left, skeptical derision. But his manhood stood unchallenged. No one said he “broke down,” but rather “choked up.” I wondered whether it was acceptable because he hadn’t used up more than half of his 1.3 monthly quota. It struck me that he was an extraordinarily lucky man to be handed such a dispensation. I guess there is crying in football. I wonder if his wife cried when she heard him speak. I somehow doubt it.
We left Dunkin’ Donuts with a dozen bagels and a Box o’ Joe, and still I offered no answer to Robert’s question. We rode to the baseball field in silence, and Robert sat impassive. Stony, even. For a brief moment I longed for the toddler I once knew, or even the colicky infant, eyes so wide open to discovery. Now I was seeing more of a man than a boy, and moreover, an unfamiliar one. By all accounts—teachers, coaches, other parents—he was the exemplar of adjustment, a stellar student, a great athlete, well-liked. The only way he could improve, according to one recent teacher, was in class participation. He has, she said in her report card comments, so much to contribute.
Hers was a valuable assessment, tactful in its gentle admonition but full of foreboding for a fretful parent. Robert’s caution made no sense in the context of his lively, open mind. It might be an alarm bell, a symptom of a more chronic detachment and alienation. The internet teems with laments about the emotional neglect of male youth in America, how boys in the modern age are growing into men against the tide of loneliness, depression, suicide, and fentanyl overdose. The refrain from a multitude of conscientious parents when tragedy descends is strikingly uniform: I never knew anything was wrong. I found myself wondering how many young men’s lives might have been saved if they’d been allowed to cry.
He was asking my permission, I realized with a burst of silent, low-grade panic. This is where his question came from. After all, it was I who had conveyed to him a vision of the world as a pitiless place, I who had pushed a regimen of high achievement as the elixir of happiness. In this paradigm, fear has no place. Uncertainty and anxiety must be suppressed. My motives in guiding him were those of any father, to send him into the world armed with confidence, and maybe a smidgeon of aggression. In the process, I’d tried to give him a sense of the wonder of things, the beauty of books, film, paintings, music. But these were peripheral luxuries, indulgences for when the last ounce of success had been squeezed from experience. And as he grew I could tell he judged them as frivolities, with no place in a solution, preoccupations of the soft and weak. Looking at him, I knew which of my lessons he’d internalized, and I cursed myself. He was my creation. But for all of that, he was opaque to me. The clay was hardening, and as we neared our destination, I feared what I had wrought. The simple privilege of crying, this was a reasonable request from a boy on the bridge to manhood. I knew this moment was a crucible, one of the last chances I’d have to alter things, to sculpt a new perception in him, to give him the priceless gift of guiltless tears.
When had I cried in front him? There must have been one time, some long forgotten incident where he’d seen me give way. Not when either of my parents died—he wasn’t there. Any other times I could conjure happened before he was alive.
There was a time with my own father, a good and decent man, who, like most of his generation, was more inclined to action than words, thoughts than emotions. But there was one precious moment, when I was twenty and disintegrating, my psyche raw and dangerous and my desperation clear, when I saw how scared he was for me, and my despair, and he started to cry. We were sitting in the car, waiting for a bus to take me back into the city. I clung on to him, and he held me, my face against his chest, melting into his warmth. In the beats of his heart, and his desolate sighs, I could feel his soul for the first time in all its softness, innocence and confusion. Nothing like this ever passed between us again, but for me that moment changed everything.
“I cried when you were born!” I blurted as we pulled into a space behind the backstop. I looked at him, and he stared back at me with the exact eyes that had latched onto mine for dear life as I held him in the delivery room. “You saw me cry then.”
A bemused little smile emerged on his face as he gathered up his baseball bag.
“That doesn’t count!” he scoffed.
“Why not? Just because you can’t remember that now? You saw me, just the same.”
“No,” he said as he jumped out of the car. “Because you were crying for joy, right? At least I hope you were! Doesn’t count.”
“Get out of here,” I said, dismissing him with a playful backhand wave as my throat constricted, and the trickle started. But Robert didn’t see. He was already halfway to the dugout.
John Van Wagner lives and writes in New Jersey. His work has been recently published in October Hill Magazine, Marrow Magazine, New Pop Lit, and elsewhere.
