Reflections From a Colicky Mother
At the start of pregnancy, I anticipated a much different world than the one my child entered.
I spent months praying for a healthy child and a happy one. Among many prayers, I prayed she would not be afflicted with colic, that our daughter would not inexplicably cry for hours on end and days after that. But I was the colicky one—the one who cried for days and nights, both with and without reason. I would love to say shifting hormones caused all of the spilt tears, but I am not sure that is truthful.
I have always been "sensitive," as my mother lovingly calls it. It's a rough translation to "she cries a lot." In some ways, a lifetime of tears prepared me for those first few weeks and months of motherhood. Even still—the shame I felt around my weeping during postpartum was heady and weighted.
Like most in our culture, I came to see tears as synonymous with weakness and buried the shame of that weakness deep in my gut. During most fits of sobs, I felt a need to be “stronger.” As a new mother, that shame intensified—I not only felt compelled to be strong for the sake of some arbitrary definition of being strong, but for the sake and wellbeing of my newborn daughter. Her six-pound-three-ounce heft relied on me in ways I couldn’t have understood in the months or years before her birth. I laid crushed beneath the weight of expectations I placed on myself, and I sat in a puddle of my tears for what felt like an eternity.
What carried me in those swells of shame was a resolve that perhaps strength is not to be pursued in the Kingdom of God. Or at least not in the way that earthen eyes see fit. In the kingdom of God, up is down and left is right, and poor is rich, and death is life. And weak is strong. Earthly opposites are heavenly partnerships, and our penultimate prayer as we step one foot in front of the other on thorny ground is “on earth as it is in heaven.” With these tears that I wore on my eyes like spectacles, I was able to see my crying as an asset to my faith and not a detraction.
Christ himself is no stranger to weeping. The God-man, experiencing the trials and emotions that we feel, clothed in flesh as we are, cried the tears that we cry. He wept at the mouth of Lazarus’s tomb, his dear friend (John 11:35). He cried over the city he loved, Jerusalem (Luke 19:41-44). He cried out, forsaken, on the cross (Matthew 27:46). These narratives tell us a story of Christ's humanity. It is without sin that he cried and felt the full range of human emotion. His tears give us permission, perhaps encouragement, to cry our own.
I have been a mother for a small fraction of time, but what I know to be true already is this: there will be no shortage of circumstances in which I will express myself through tears. Whether sorrow, or joy, or fatigue, or frustration, I will cry. I can assume that my daughter might be near to see the tears as they fall. The idea of her seeing me, crying and disheveled, used to send shockwaves down my spine. But my understanding of Jesus's crying has been reframed, and I am no longer hesitant to allow my daughter as witness to my crying.
Make no mistake: I am not advocating for placing the burden of adult circumstances and trials on a child. I am merely speaking to the benefit there might be if we would be honest with ourselves, God, and our children that crying is permissible and spiritually formative.
When we look to Christ, seeing his tears and circumstances, we step into a cleft of comfort. Ought we expect our children to have a different response? If we're consoled by seeing Jesus as our sympathizer, can't we expect that our children would respond to this, too? We look to Christ’s weakness for strength, for consolation in his tears, and we can be encouraged that the same thing can happen if/when our children see us cry. Ultimately, we can use our tears as a means by which we point up, up, and heavenward to Jesus, to the cross, toward the day Christ himself wipes away our tears when all is made new.
The tears of Jesus require us to confront our perceptions of weakness and strength. As readers of the whole of Scripture, we look at the weakness of Christ on the cross and the strength of Jesus's authority over death in tandem. We see weakness as a companion to strength. We who are colicky have an opportunity to see that weakness and strength in action. My encouragement to you is this: your crying holds power to form you in Christlikeness, and those same tears can offer your children a glimpse of Jesus.
