Friday, 09 August 2013 08:01

Crying It Out: Continuing On, Even Through the Rain

By Kate Towne Sherwin | Families Today

The rainy first half of the summer had me remembering something I learned a long time ago. When I was in college, I had the good fortune of spending a semester abroad in Ireland. Though I’d be going to the university in Galway, we first spent a few days in Dublin for orientation. Among other things, my friends and I learned how to take care of our basic needs while living in Ireland—we received information on banking, grocery stores, laundromats, transportation, etc.—but the bit of advice that was burned into my memory like no other was, “If you wait for the rain to stop, you’ll never go anywhere.”

Good advice for this summer, and it also struck me that it’s kind of like parenthood, don’t you think?

I was thinking of it recently as I was getting the two little boys ready to go somewhere with me. The three-year-old was in a fury about something, I don’t remember what, but I do remember that he kept crying, constantly crying, in an angry and unremitting way. He cried while I had him go to the bathroom; he cried while I helped him get his shoes on; he cried while I got myself ready; he cried while I changed the baby’s diaper. We walked out the front door and down the front steps while he cried. I loaded the baby into the stroller while he cried. We started off on our walk, and he was still crying. It wasn’t until we were halfway down the street that it occurred to me that it might look strange, a mama walking down the street with a wailing child. 

But seriously, if I’d either (a) tried to figure out why he was crying in order to try to remedy the situation or (b) waited until he stopped crying on his own, we never would have left the house.

Once the babies have grown into small children and can’t be soothed with nursing or a clean diaper or by being held, I find that neither option (a) nor (b) really ever seems to work anyway. The reasons for crying are so often un-fixable, aren’t they? We were all in the van the other day when the same three-year-old started to cry. After much asking of what the matter was, I finally figured out that his shoe was crooked. I don’t really think the problem was so much that his shoe was crooked as it was that he was trying to straighten it and wasn’t able to. I couldn’t climb back and help—we had too many bags in between us—so I asked his brother to help him. I probably should have known this would make the situation worse, but I was still under the illusion that we could do something to stop the crying.

A friend was telling me about traveling with her one-year-old, and how, during one recent trip, he cried and cried and would not be appeased. She kept pulling over to try to soothe him, but when it became clear that there wasn’t much that could be done, she knew she had to just keep driving or else they’d never get home.

I have another boy who will start wailing because of one reason—his brother sat in his chair, or his brother won’t stop looking at him, or his brother is playing with the very toy he himself had been playing with the day before yesterday—and when he’s cried his heart out about that, he’ll keep crying for a different reason—he misses Daddy when he’s at work, or sometimes he really wants a second yogurt but I won’t let him, or he asked for a particular toy last Christmas and Santa didn’t bring it—this boy will not stop crying until he’s good and ready, even if he has to keep thinking of things to be sad about, even if it means crying for two hours straight.

So we just keep bumping along, moving forward as much as possible, and often the forward motion is what’s most effective at stopping the crying, or at least the busyness of keeping on makes it seem like the crying ends quicker. Funny enough, there’s an Ireland analogy for that too: Since we didn’t let the rain stop us, we often got completely soaked, but we quickly found that our clothes dried quicker if we kept them on rather than taking them off and hanging them somewhere to dry. Whether it was the effect of the Irish wind on us as we walked about in wet clothes, or simply the walking about itself, I am telling you that our clothes dried quicker on our bodies than off.

Anyway, it seems a good life lesson to know that, under normal circumstances, being mad or sad doesn’t mean you can stop doing what needs to be done. At least, that’s what I tell myself, as I feel my brain melting during the hundredth child-crying jag of the day. That, and the fact that Ireland—and here recently as well—gets its gorgeous greenery from its abundant rain. That must be a sign of hope of some kind, right?

Kate Towne Sherwin is a stay-at-home mom (SAHM) living in Saratoga Springs with her husband and their sons Thomas (8), Gabriel (7), John Dominic (5), Xavier (3), and Thaddeus (19 months). She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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