This comment was by Bill Reed about the post “Breaking the Man Rule” by William Dameron.
“Growing up there was one rule that was pounded into me and that was “big boys don’t cry.” To cry was to automatically show a vulnerability embarrassing for both those who saw it and myself. As I got older I learned that if, for whatever reason, I felt the need to cry I needed to hold off until I could find some place alone to really get my cry on. After my dad died, I was told by my mother that he had, in fact, cried quite often away from us. Apparently the rule was “big boys don’t cry …where others can see them.” My favorite place to cry is in bed a night … alone. I cry for others as well as my self, but always with a destructive sense that i am somehow weak for doing so. I do tell myself that my childhood training was wrong, that it is OK to cry, but I don’t really believe it. There is much more to tell — times that I’ve cried in front of someone who should have understood, but used it as weapon instead — but I’ll leave it here. Thanks for calling attention to this post.”
photo by steve heath / flickr
And now if we could just get women on board with the “don’t cry” message and take away that ace up their sleeves we are approaching equality. Multiple times, in the past 25 years, I’ve experienced young, female, inept, architects hide behind their ovaries- I guess their mothers had explained the cry during a traffic stop gambit– and weep when confronted with their mistakes and/or ignorance.
One of the most embarrassing moments of my life was when I started crying while my chemistry teacher tried for the 100th time to explain to me an equation after school. I am used to understanding things (including math) quickly, and while I technically understood what he was saying I just could not make the numbers add up on my own. After half an hour I got so incredibly angry and *frustrated* with myself that I started tearing up, and then I was embarrassed for tearing up and terrified that he would think I was crying just for sympathy, that… Read more »