“Don’t cry in front of the kids”, “Stay strong for those babies”; These are the kinds of things we say to ourselves and others when life is hanging heavy on us.

Mom’s are notorious for holding back tears and forcing back the natural way to release some of the pain building up on the inside. Often, in stressful and hurtful situations, two things are required, prayer and tears. One we gladly do in front of our children but the other we hide away.

We have somehow convinced ourselves that showing our children our brokenness will some how break them; that showing that we are weak or fragile or human will in some way cause weakness in them. So, we push our pain down, lock our tear ducts shut, deny our brokenness to manifest itself on the outside, all to protect our babies from our fears of what those salty little drops of water might do to their little heads and hearts.

Just recently I received an email that caused my heart to burst into flame, and my internal sprinkler system went off without delay. Tears started pouring from my eyes and heavy, uncontrollable, sobs followed.

Instantly I panicked and reached for an onion and a kitchen knife to mask my emotional tears and pass them off as chemical ones. My children are very familiar with the combination of mom’s sensitive eyes and onions causing rivers to roll down my cheeks. They are not familiar with mom spontaneously bursting into the kind of crying that results in boogers and breathing problems.

I was crying so hard I could barely see the onion let alone cut it and I was sure an ER visit was in my near future if I didn’t get a handle on my emotions. Crazy thing is I was willing to cut off a finger so that my children didn’t see me crying.

Try as I might I could not fool my empathetic three year old daughter who happened to be in the kitchen with me at the time. She was not convinced by my onion cover and came over quickly to console me.

At first I felt so upset for allowing myself to breakdown while she was there. I felt as though my inability to suck it up was another fault in my person.

As I held her in my arms, desperately trying to convince her it was the onions making me cry, she lovingly looked into my tear filled eyes, gently held her little hands to my sopping wet cheeks, and told me, “Mommy cry? I here with you”. Then she gave me a big hug and patted her little hands against my back.

The love that flowed from that little heart had more layers than the onion on the cutting board, and it taught me a very valuable lesson.

We are supposed to raise our children in the way they should go. In trying to suppress my emotions I was inadvertently taking away the opportunity for my baby to use her gift of empathy and strengthen her desire to care for others. In trying to “stay strong” and hide my emotions I was really only allowing fear to rob us both of a beautifully real life moment that strengthened our bond not only as mother and daughter, but as humans in a pain filled world.

When the tears were done pouring from my eyes and the tissues could be put away, my daughter was not damaged by my tears. My tears didn’t scare her and she was not unsettled by my human-ness. Rather she pointed out my happiness and celebrated it with me, encouraging me to feel better and find joy amongst the sorrow.

She taught me a few lessons that day that I will never forget. One being that the only way I can teach my children what to do with their emotions; how to live with them but not by them, is to live by example.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not eager to invite them into the heaviness of life without filter, rather I want to show them that emotional responses to any kind of pain are natural and so are the desires of others to help us in our pain and shoulder some of the burden. Both are good and serve a valuable purpose.

I can only pray that perhaps my children will walk away knowing that it’s okay to cry, we all do, and that it’s also okay to be comforted by a loved one without guilt or shame. To stand back up again stronger than before, not because we are strong enough to hold back the tears, but because we were real enough to let them fall.