My Hillary Moment: It's My Son and I Can Cry if I Want To

By Delia Lloyd

"It's all right to cry...Crying gets the sad out of you..." Remember those lyrics? For those of us who came of age in the Free to Be... You and Me generation, Rosey Grier's tender, reassuring voice provided solace to millions of children who—in the aftermath of the emotional zeitgeist that was the 60s—learned that crying is both normal and healthy. In the decades since, scores of parenting books have echoed this theme: kids cry; it's a way of expressing themselves; don't worry too much about it.

But what about parents? Is it all right to cry in front of your kids? And if so, when? And why do we do it?

I've had reason to think about this lately because, like Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, I recently had a crying moment of my own. I was stripping my son's bed when I came across a book underneath his pillow. It was a brand new picture book of the world's most famous soccer stars. I instantly recognized it as one he'd spotted at a school book fair the week before and had been hounding me to purchase ever since.

I'll be fair: we live in London, so for a six-year-old boy, a book full of photos and stats of professional soccer players is almost as exciting as a face-to-face meeting with Albus Dumbledore. But with Hanukkah, Christmas, and his birthday all about to arrive, I felt that the last thing he needed was another present. So I told him that I'd make a note of it and put it on his list, which he correctly inferred was my gentle way of saying, "No."

Seizing the purloined object from under his pillow, I ran downstairs to where my son was playing a match of Fantasy Footie on the computer.

"Isaac, where did you get this?" I asked sternly, waving the book in his face.

He blushed and lowered his eyes. "I...um...bought it with my own money."

"You don't have any money!" I shrieked, momentarily relieved that my dilatory approach to introducing an allowance had eliminated this as a feasible answer.

Knowing this—and here I give him points for creativity—he said that he'd bought it with his "foreign currency," a hodgepodge of Euros, Shekels, and US coins amassed from assorted travel.

"Don't lie!"

He then resorted to his only remaining tactic: sympathy. "I just wanted to borrow it!" he protested meekly. "I was going to return it tomorrow!"

I took a moment to gather my thoughts as I decided how to respond. Should I explode in a fit of rage? Lower my voice, place a hand on his shoulder, and speak with furrowed brow? Give him time out for a week? And then I did something I never imagined I'd do in response to this kind of situation: I cried.

It's not that my kids have never prompted me to cry before. I cried when Isaac was one-week-old, and I was so engorged with breastmilk that I had every lactation consultant within a two-mile radius on speed dial to help sooth my pain. I cried when my one-year-old daughter had a double ear infection and stayed up all night, every night, for a week, screaming her lungs out. And, on occasion, I have cried from the sheer work that is involved in trying to raise young children. But it's one thing to cry out of the frustration or exhaustion of parenting and quite another thing to cry out of disappointment with something your child has done. And so, like the stream of media analysts doing their eternal postmortem on Hillary's crying episode, I had to ask myself: Why did I do it?

One answer is that these were tears of shame. In the narcissistic way in which we so often see our children as extensions of our own strengths and weaknesses, maybe I cried because of what others might think.