What Made You Cry Today?

[Gemme]

Music. If nothing else loosens the tap on the waterworks for me, it's music. Whether it's because of grief or sadness, happiness or pure appreciation for a voice or lyric that grabs you by the jugular and won't let go until you give into it, music has the power to move me like nothing else.

[Kätzchen]

it was earlier this morning...
listening quietly to music streaming
through to my ears and wandering
through photos and albums of things
my sons have given to me over the years
and the song below, was in the playlist
and tears spilled... funny how music
gives us the ability to connect more deeply
to our feelings...

[laruss]

Watching Dear John, I bawled.

[Soon]

I cried in a terrible dream I was having...I made myself wake up but was gasping as I did. Horrible.

[ArtistLady]

My son acting like an a** and screaming at me over stinking politics. Is this really the same person I raised? He was such a sweet child. Grown children can really break your heart.

[Bleu]

Remembering my father and my best friend.

[cinnamongrrl]

I picked up a favorite book of mine, Merle's Door...I read the last page...

That book was one of many that I read in preparation for losing my dog, Matty.... it was all I could do in the form of self help...

I loved the book...but it made me profoundly sad...both the story and the memories it evokes.....

[firegal]

Knowing there won't be another Christmas with my lil sis.

[starryeyes]

Seeing my Dad, and the state he is in. All alone and in a horribly abusive relationship and not willing to do anything about it. No wonder he's going half cookoo. I wish I could force him to come home with me, but I know I can't. He needs to make the first step. I'll be here when he is ready tho.

[Greyson]

Today, I stayed away from the news of the day and thought of my deceased Mom and Christmas past. I also enjoyed some of the now of today's Christmas with my now family. All of this, tears of sorrow and joy.

[Breezy]

These were good cries:

My Mama called me! I know my brother dialed the phone and held it for her, but my Mama called me!!!!!!

Later on, I was listening to one of my kids talk about this gift he was given and how he didn't expect it. Well, he left the room and I was alone, everyone is asleep, and I hear a noise behind me. I turn to look but no one is there. Then I realize I see the Methodist symbol on the floor on a white note atop a red card with a green ribbon.

I got up and before I picked it up, I immediately thought of my Dad who died 2 years ago. I picked it up and said to the room, "Do that again." The noise re-occurred and I knew it was my Dad saying here I am. You found the card, you didn't need me to make that sound again but I obliged you.
I cried like a baby.

And, last but not least, my youngest teen. We made chocolate cherry cheesecake together. She never wants to cook with me. It was the best! Yep, you guessed it, I cried.

[rockstar lover]

I just got home from seeing Les Misérables in the theatre....

[Gemme]

Yesterday was one of those days. That kind of day that just when you recover from one experience, another one knocks you down again. Rinse, lather and repeat. All day. Some things were connected and some were not, but had the misfortune of occurring at the same time. Some were professional and some were personal.

Many a tear fell. Some came quietly, sweetly and some came noisily, clamoring for recognition. I don't think I'm finished but, for now, they are silent.

[girl_dee]

still thinking about those poor firefighters who were gunned down. Maybe it hits home more than anything else because my beloved Syr goes out to calls all the time, and this could have happened.

Firefighters and their families make great sacrifices. i am sure being a first responder that there was never a fear of being gunned down after being paged to a call, a call to save lives, and possibly being a target.

Now there is.

[bkisbutchenuff]

Music....it is such an important - driving/guiding part of my life... This morning....melodies and lyrics....says it all about the past, present and the future!

[Blade]

writing a check for my property taxes....dang my checking account was looking so good....didn't really cry but it sure knocked the wind out of my sail

[Miss Scarlett]

My Mom...just yesterday I caught myself reaching for the phone to call her...wanted to share several recent happy events and news with her...I still talk to her but it would have been wonderful to hear her voice...

[cinnamongrrl]

This did....and while I was at work too!


http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-livin...171500313.html

[Gemme]

Originally Posted by cinnamongrrl563

This did....and while I was at work too!


http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-livin...171500313.html

Yanno, until I read that, I hadn't shed one single tear today.

I blame you.

[Scottish MacDaddy]

Written by Nila on Dec. 29, 2012:


That girl, the one without the name. The one just like us. The one whose battered body stood for all the anonymous women in this country whose rapes and deaths are a footnote in the left-hand column of the newspaper.

Sometimes, when we talk about the history of women in India, we speak in shorthand. The Mathura rape case. The Vishaka guidelines. The Bhanwari Devi case, the Suryanelli affair, the Soni Sori allegations, the business at Kunan Pushpora. Each of these, the names of women and places, mapping a geography of pain; unspeakable damage inflicted on women’s bodies, on the map of India, where you can, if you want, create a constantly updating map of violence against women.




For some, amnesia becomes a way of self-defence: there is only so much darkness you can swallow. They turn away from all the places that have become shorthand for violence beyond measure, preferring not to know about Kashmir or the outrages in Chattisgarh, choosing to forget the Bombay New Year assault, trying not to remember the deaths of a Pallavi Purkayastha, a Thangjam Manorama, Surekha and Priyanka Bhotmange, the mass rapes that marked the riots in Gujarat. Even for those who stay in touch, it isn’t possible for your empathy to keep abreast with the scale of male violence against women in India: who can follow all of the one-paragraph, three-line cases? The three-year-old raped before she can speak, the teenager assaulted by an uncle, the 65-year-old raped as closure to a property dispute, the slum householder raped and violently assaulted on her way to the bathroom. After a while, even memory hardens.

And then you reach a tipping point, and there’s that girl. For some reason, and I don’t really know why, she got through to us. Our words shrivelled in the face of what she’d been subjected to by the six men travelling on that bus, who spent an hour torturing and raping her, savagely beating up her male friend. Horrific, brutal, savage—these tired words point to a loss of language, and none of them express how deeply we identified with her.

She had not asked to become a symbol or a martyr, or a cause; she had intended to lead a normal life, practicing medicine, watching movies, going out with friends. She had not asked to be brave, to be the girl who was so courageous, the woman whose injuries symbolised the violence so many women across the country know so intimately. She had asked for one thing, after she was admitted to Safdarjung Hospital: “I want to live,” she had said to her mother.

We may have not noticed the reports that came in from Calcutta in February, of a woman abandoned on Howrah Bridge, so badly injured after a rape that involved, once again, the use of iron rods, that the police thought she had been run over by a car. We may have skimmed the story of the 16-year-old Dalit girl in Dabra, assaulted for three hours by eight men, who spoke up after her father committed suicide from the shame he had been made to feel by the village. Or some may have done something concrete about these things, changed laws, worked on gender violence, keeping their feelings out of it, trying to be objective.

But there is always one that gets through the armour that we build around ourselves. In 1972, the first year in which the NCRB recorded rape cases, there were 2,487 rapes reported across India. One of them involved a teenager called Mathura, raped by policemen; we remember her, we remember the history and the laws she changed. (She would be 56 now.)

Some cases stop being cases. Sometimes, an atrocity bites so deep that we have no armour against it, and that was what happened with the 23-year-old physiotherapy student, the one who left a cinema hall and boarded the wrong bus, whose intestines were so badly damaged that the injuries listed on the FIR report made hardened doctors, and then the capital city, cry for her pain.

She died early this morning, in a Singapore hospital where she and her family had been dispatched by the government for what the papers called political, not compassionate, reasons.

The grief hit harder than I’d expected. And I had two thoughts, as across Delhi, I heard some of the finest and toughest men I know break down in their grief, as some of the calmest and strongest women I know called and SMSed to say that she—one of us, this girl who had once had a future and a life of her own to lead—was gone, that it was over.

The first was: enough. Let there be an end to this epidemic of violence, this culture where if we can’t kill off our girls before they are born, we ensure that they live these lives of constant fear. Like many women in India, I rely on a layer of privilege, a network of friends, paranoid security measures and a huge dose of amnesia just to get around the city, just to travel in this country. So many more women have neither the privilege, nor the luxury of amnesia, and this week, perhaps we all stood up to say, “Enough”, no matter how incoherently or angrily we said it.

The second was even simpler. I did not know the name of the girl in the bus, through these last few days. She had a name of her own–it was not Amanat, Damini or Nirbhaya, names the media gratuitously gave her, as though after the rape, she had been issued a new identity. I don’t need to know her name now, especially if her family doesn’t want to share their lives and their grief with us. I think of all the other anonymous women whose stories don’t make it to the front pages, when I think of this woman; I think of the courage that is forced on them, the way their lives are warped in a different direction from the one they had meant to take. Don’t tell me her name; I don’t need to know it, to cry for her.