Kieu Phong

When I am being a good mother and I let them cry it out, I always say to them that they need to let out all the bad stuff so the good feelings have room. fucoidan usa And I've believed what I've been saying - as applied to them. However, in my heart I haven't truly extended that same courtesy to myself. Sure I cry. I tear up at all the stories on Facebook about wounded soldiers and stray puppies. Every Friday morning on my way to work I am guaranteed to shed a tear listening to StoryCorps on NPR. I cry when I don't have money to give the nineteen-year-old meth head standing next to my car as I wait to enter the freeway. I am an indiscriminate crier. But I am discreet. I almost never cry in front of my children. Except for the time my husband took my youngest for his first haircut (without telling me) and lopped off all his golden baby hair into a crew cut. I cried. And stopped speaking to him for three days. But I digress.

Even when a cry sneaks up on me it has a definite time limit. I can't cry for longer than 3-5 minutes. And even that seems like an eternity. I shed a couple of tears, get a runny nose then pull on my big girl panties and get back to being who the world needs me to be - wife, mother, friend, professional. No I'm going to own this. It isn't who the world needs me to be. It is who I think the world needs me to be. Strong, tough, together, tao spirulina yet empathetic.

You know where this is going, right? Don't you just love the way the universe conspires to teach you how not in control you are? Ever? So like all great illusions, mine was busted up at 9:07am last Friday. I got some bad news. Sure it was bad. But it wasn't anything I hadn't handled before. Looking back it could have been the culmination of perfect storm of stressors like having been sick with strep throat for a week (working moms aren't allowed to get sick, right?), having barely made it through all the self-imposed holiday stress, and having tough news delivered. A trifecta of challenges that pushed me over the edge.

Because I started crying at 9:07am and I didn't stop until sometime after 2:00pm.

For real.

I didn't even know that was physically possible. I had colic as a baby and I'm fairly certain that was the last time I cried that hard and that