Crying inside by Luis Miranda As a child I was taught that men don’t cry, unless someone dies. It’s one of those male axioms that a “mucho macho” culture teaches us and that we carry with us for the rest of our lives. If you cry, and you are a man, you are ridiculed as a cry-baby, a sucker, a wimp. We should not applaud this hardened cultural error: it is a horrible thing to teach men that causes us to have truncated emotions, that we cannot feel, cannot express the full range of emotions that God has given us. But as a child I also learned that though we can’t show any tears, crying, screaming or pained facial expressions, we can “cry inside.” I’ll explain myself. On occasions, my male superego tells me that my eyes are on the verge of welling up with tears, I’m about to lose my cool and there is no corpse or gravely ill person to justify this reaction. This is when I begin to cry inside – I shut my eyes, my face freezes but my core is screaming, crying, trembling. Crying inside, whether from happiness or sadness, is the escape valve that we men have to adjust our emotional equilibrium while we continue to follow the social standard that men don’t cry. It’s not as good as actually crying but it’s better than nothing. I remember when we drove my daughter to college in Troy, NY and left her there. My wife cried for the two and a half hours it took us to return home. And while I ridiculed her actions, my face froze, I shut my eyes and I cried inside for two and a half hours. Upon our return home, I went into my daughter’s room, kissed her pillow, froze my face, shut my eyes and cried inside a little more. After all, this was not a time to cry openly, no one had died, no one was ill. I will never forget the day that I left Puerto Rico forever. My entire family was at the airport. When it came time to say goodbye my sister cried, my mother was hysterical, my brother who was only six years old also cried. But my father gave me a kiss on the cheek, put $20 in my pocket and cried inside – his face was frozen and he shut his eyes. I did the same, I had learned it from him, and on the day that I became an immigrant, officially one of the saddest days of my life, I did not shed a single tear, instead, a flood of pain shook within. There are moments that are not as significant as becoming an immigrant or taking a child to college that also shake up one’s emotional equilibrium. I recall the day when my son called me crying because he had broken up with his first serious girlfriend. I heard the emotional horror of the breakup in his voice and I, on the other side of the phone, could not calm his pain, placate his sadness. A person never wants to see a child suffer and I would have wanted to cry with him. But instead I talked to him softly with love, and when I hung up the phone I braced myself and cried within, in silence. I also learned that “crying inside” had ended with my generation. And that he, as I have also taught my nephew, will be able to express himself as we were meant to, with the rainbow of emotions that shines within each man. They have learned to cry. The days of crying inside are over.
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