My History

What brings a tear of joy to your eye?

It doesn’t take much to make me cry. Even happy things. Case in point, last summer when I was at the knitting camp with my online knitting friends in Syracuse. On the last day together, they surprised me with a birthday cake and a chorus of “Happy Birthday”. My birthday was on the first day of camp, but they surprised me on the last day, making it a true surprise. It made me so happy that I cried as they sang.

The funny thing is, there was a time when I was on a new medication for my mental health and it heightened my emotional sensitivity so that even the slightest happy thing made me tear up. Do you remember that video some guy posted where he was losing his mind with excitement and maybe even cried because he saw a double rainbow? Yeah, I could have made a whole series of videos myself over things as simple as rainbows. I didn’t stay on that medicine for long.

But even now that my emotions aren’t as amplified as they were on that medicine, I do tear up over things that aren’t sad. Was it the Academy Awards this year that opened with Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo singing something from the Wizard of Oz and Wicked? Yeah, that made me cry.

To answer the question then, anything that stirs up emotion in me is going to make me tear up. Whether it’s a sad emotion or a happy one. It’s a lot of different things.

In fact, I have the perfect example from just last night. I’m back home from my trip to Chicago now, but on my last day, my sisters and I decided to hang out at our middle sister’s house where we were all staying. We ate deep dish pizza from Giordano’s (absolutely amazingly delicious by the way!), and afterwards, we all gathered in her basement area and did various things. From playing pool, to my nieces giving us spa treatments (hair chalk on my hair, a shoulder massage, and something to put under my eyes for my “wrinkles”—kids are nothing if not brutally honest, lol!). In addition to all of that, we went through a huge tub of photo albums and picture boxes.

All of the pictures in the tub had belonged to our mother. When she and my father decided to abandon a permanent home and live in an RV, she gave much of her stuff to my sisters to hold onto until she had space to take it back. I guess the RV life was not ever meant to be a permanent thing.

The experience of going through a lifetime (hers and ours) of pictures, brought up various emotions in me. I created a stack of photos that I decided I was taking back with me. As my oldest sister said, this is my history too. I went no contact with my parents a few months ago and I don’t intend to ever re-establish communication. Of course, never say never, but right now, my heart is indeed saying never. I felt that if my mother ever did take her pictures back, I would never see them again, so this was my chance to take the ones that meant the most to me.

Really though, there was one picture that I was looking for. One. One picture from my childhood that I told many people about over the years. I had to find it. I told my sisters months ago that I needed to find it. This was a huge tub of pictures and it felt like the whole needle in the haystack hunt. But I found the picture. And one that was similar to it that I had forgotten about. At the time that I found the picture, everybody had gone back upstairs to get ready for bed since we had an early departure in the morning, both my oldest sister and I. My nieces had gone to their room to play by then. But when I held that picture for the first time in a long time, I screamed out that I found it. Excitedly, I ran up the stairs to show off the picture. My sisters knew the significance of the picture, but my brother-in-law didn’t. As I explained to him what the picture was all about, I choked up. The tears came. I didn’t want to stand there crying over a picture, so after my brief explanation, I went back downstairs to look at it again. At that point, I didn’t want to see any of the other pictures in the tub. I put back what I had taken out and gathered the small stack that I was taking home with me. I went upstairs and packed my suitcase. The pictures went in my carry-on. I wasn’t taking a chance that my suitcase would be lost in transit and these pictures would be gone again.

The story of the picture goes back to all of my years as a teacher. I was a teacher for 18 years. Over the course of all those years talking to parents, I would often get asked about what made me want to be a teacher. And every time, I would answer the same way. Something like, I have just always wanted to be a teacher. I’d go on to say that even as a little kid, I would play ‘school’ in my bedroom. And then I’d tell them that my mom even has a picture of me on the floor teaching my Cabbage Patch dolls. She must have heard me talking in my bedroom one day. So she quietly opened the door and snapped a picture of me teaching my ‘students’.

That picture was my validation for my teaching career. Proof to anyone who asked that teaching was deep in my heart from a young age. And yet, for all of those years, I didn’t have the picture. Hidden away somewhere in the many albums and boxes of pictures that my mom had.

Though I’m not a teacher anymore and don’t ever intend to return to that field, seeing that picture again touched my heart. It reminded me that while the end of my career in education was traumatic and has taken me a year to heal from, my heart was in it up to the very end. Like that Oasis song, “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, I’m not looking back with anything but fondness for the memories.

I am absolutely having these two pictures framed. As my oldest sister said, this is my history.