i don’t cry anymore.

no, that’s not quite right. i don’t let the things that used to make me cry, cry anymore. i don’t lose tears over hallmark commercials, touching moments in sitcoms, the trials and tribulations of people and their misfortunes du jour. sure, i feel for them. this life is not an easy one.

this LIFE, if you are lucky enough to be living it, is not easy at all. but i can’t feel for everyone anymore. i hurt for the helpless, for the children and the animals, for the voiceless, the homeless, the man i saw last week with sweatpants torn and fashioned into shoes. i ache for them and sometimes, i will cry for them.

but on the whole, i am selfish with my tears. my tears are for my girls. my beautiful perfect sweet little girls. my tears are for me and T and our families who waited forever for those gifts, and were rewarded by their too-soon arrival. maybe it’s because i never knew pain like this even filled our world, my old world of choking up at a sweet greeting card advertisement, of welling eyes at a sentimental tv moment. now as i sit and watch or listen to a sad story, i am sympathetic, i wish things were different, but i don’t cry.

it’s true that i didn’t have any idea what horror a life could hold. not a sliver of an idea of the opaque screen which separates the mundane from utter torment; ignorant that the passage would be so easily and unwillingly breached- that i would be forcefully thrown into the revelation of the world’s true sorrows, previously and so gratefully unbeheld. that my family would come rocketing in after me, each of us reeling and wounded.

i was naive, i was innocent and happy. bits and pieces of these affects remain. but i will never be that girl again, the one who cries for everyone, even as i understand that most do not know what i wish they will never know. what the ones of us who live and have become would do anything to forget.

i cry for families who have lost their children, i cry for the sick, for the old and unloved. but mainly i cry for them, and for their mother. selfish, hot tears for the lost innocence of not only the three of us, but too many more that i love and care for. we lost so much more than our babies that day. we lost our wide eyed view of the world, our trust in what should be. the belief that life is fair.