Ugly Cry

I'm feeling pretty buoyant and productive today.  Got all my reading done for tomorrow, finalizing Cuba plans.  Getting the student panel together for this semester.  Walking briskly across campus and hearing the staccato of my boot heels with every step I take.  I started the morning out with a free cup of coffee because I had 10 stamps on my Jittery Joe's card.  You better believe I wanted whipped cream on top.  I had a free Indian buffet lunch because the department had funds to treat a few students to lunch along with a potential PhD student to answer questions and share our experiences in the program and I was asked to join.  I'm back on that track.

But flashback to Monday morning.  I had the ugliest cry I'd had in a while.  I can say these things and look back with a smile because now, a couple of days removed from it, it seems absurd, how a particular moment can feel so incredibly despairing and absolute.  I am dramatic. I own up to it.  What adds another dynamic to these despairing moments is when they are shared with an equally dramatic person, my dear mother.  I love this woman so much.  But put the two of us together in a heightened emotional state, and you have an instant drama fest.  Me, crying like my soul was being wrenched from me.  At the same time, my mom, sitting beside me and reading out loud a letter she wrote to me in response to a little tiff we'd had the night before.  Me, wailing and snotting harder at hearing lines like, "I'm sorry if your rest through the night was not peaceful.  I know mine wasn't.  I chose to stay up and play Angry Birds until 2:30 a.m." and "Don't you know your father and I won't be here always?  In a moment's time, life changes can happen that would make us being here not a reason anymore except that we would be laid to rest here."  Really, mom?  A mother-daughter melodrama.

But somehow, once I started breathing evenly (instead of those sharp, hyperventilating breaths you take when you have an ugly cry), once the flow of fluids and other unsightly secretions slowed, I felt cleansed.  A calm washed over me.  A warm, maternal presence beside me, speaking soothing words, regardless of whether they were relevant or the "right" thing to say, was enough.

I am thankful for these cathartic moments.  I am thankful for my mother.  Unattractive and dramatic and absurd though they may be, I am thankful for cleansing, ugly cries.