I: The Weeping Woman
The woman knelt, hunched, head resting in her left hand. In her other hand was a half-wilted wreath. A statue in the Logan City Cemetery, she sat above us on a pedestal over a grave marked Cronquist, a permanent reminder of a woman’s grief. I held hands with classmates from my folklore class and we circled the woman, chanting, “Weep, lady, weep,” three times– hoping, like the legend claims, to see real tears slide down her stone face.
Growing up Mormon in Northern Utah, I was used to strong women reduced to weeping women; I saw them in our stories, in our church meetings, in our scripture, in myself. I half believed the statue would cry for us simply because I’d seen the way a group of people could reduce a person to her emotions only. How this woman arrived at the grave made no difference. How she made the wreath had no meaning. Her expression—dark concave eyes, a permanent frown—was not up for interpretation. To us, she was created to weep.
We circled and watched, circled and watched. It was hard to tell, my professor said, if our trip was in vain—we visited in broad daylight instead of at midnight during a full moon. These things had order. Shadows warped the statue’s face: dark in the valleys, light on the ridges. She was veiled in porous rock.
I had wept the night before I visited the statue, many times and for many reasons. I’d broken up with my boyfriend after weeks of avoiding him, and I might have cried out of relief. I’d watched P.S. I Love You with my roommates and cried over the main character’s loss. I cried again, tears induced by laughing hard with those same roommates at our bits and made-up stories. I’m a crier, and I always have been—the reasons for the tears surprise me just as often as I expect them. I almost envied this stone woman for her immovability. She was frozen in obvious pain, but we could not influence her with our words, our actions. I stayed back when the other students started walking back towards campus, took a closer look at her face.
She is tied up in loss, though her origin is unclear and varied, as folklore goes. Stories say she lost a child, or perhaps a man in some war—experiences we’ve accepted warrant a woman’s tears. She’s not alone, either; weeping women appear all over the country in different graveyards, and researchers and teenagers alike legend-trip to catch her in action, crying or walking around headstones, mourning her dead family. The women are usually stuck hunching or kneeling or bowing in curled, everlasting shapes of devastation. The night before, when I’d washed my face after crying over the breakup, I had stood hunched over the sink staring at my red eyes, the tears and water mixed and running down my face. I cried harder seeing myself in such a state; pity for myself, as if in the mirror she was some other person.
It was fraught to expect anything more from this woman; she was only what we made her to be.
II: Genetics
I used to wish my mother would cry. During testimony meetings at our Mormon church, I would nudge her, tilt my head towards the pulpit. Other members streamed up and down the stairs leading to the stand, bearing their innermost thoughts and struggles to our congregation, often weeping at recounted spiritual experiences. My mother was a private person, introverted and hardworking; I can probably count the times I’ve seen her cry on two hands with fingers to spare. Despite existing in a religious patriarchal culture, emotional roles were reversed in our household: my mother stoic, my father vulnerable and open.
My father is a graceful crier, face never blotchy, tears releasing one at a time. He was my oxymoron—painfully gentle with strong, woodworking, motorcycle-riding, drum-playing hands, and the softest soul. He cried when he talked about his father, or when he told me how much he loved me, or when he talked about his respect for our church. With my mother, emotion was more complicated. Of the few times I remember her crying, they were all for very specific or devastating reasons: when her youngest brother unexpectedly died, or after she fell off the porch and hit her head, or from me yelling at her in high school. I found her crying in her closet that time, and of course, I immediately started crying upon seeing her in such a state—one that I personally brought out.
Still, she responds most often with logic. One of her most repeated lines growing up in response to my tears, my anger, my frustration was this: You choose your emotions. I can't make you feel anything. If I was blubbering over something irrational, she’d tell me to look at whatever ridiculous expression I was making in the mirror. You’ll laugh, she said. I promise.
She never taught me not to cry. I know many parents who go so far as punishing their children for crying, but I didn’t grow up thinking crying was good or bad; I never even considered it one or the other. I just cried. And cried and cried. My mother says she wouldn’t describe me as a fussy child, but “emotional” might be the right word. I was constantly in my head, dreaming about possibilities, other worlds, filling notebooks with ideas and stories and fantasies. Though I cried often, it was rarely in public—I wasn’t the little girl throwing tantrums, crying in class when things didn’t go my way. I was the girl who went home, processed the day, and cried about all that happened in her basement room, the curtains drawn. A cinematic moment for me and me alone.
In third grade, I was ill for what seemed like a month with the stomach flu. I stayed home from school for weeks, throwing up, lying on the couch watching movies. I wept constantly. On TV, I watched a girl yell at her mother, and I cried and cried and cried. My own mother took me to the doctor after a few days, and she asked in a low voice, Is there normally an emotional reaction to this sickness? I cried in that doctor’s office, too, when he looked at me and shook his head.
I tried to go back to school a few days later, but I ended up putting my head on my desk and crying until my teacher called my mother to take me back home. Now, my mother says this sickness only lasted a few days, which is probably true. But in my memory, it’s weeks of tears—of anything and everything causing a deep sadness I didn’t understand. You were probably just in pain, she texted me recently. It’s the only logical response.
I didn’t want to cry, and I still don’t as I’ve aged. There’s a lack of control I can’t quite reconcile, this automatic reaction to unexpected moments, sad or not. I knew I could go to my father with emotional concerns, but still craved validation and understanding from my mother. And though she’d comfort me physically, I knew if I was sad, it was my fault. I had to choose to feel something else.
I practiced at night after hard days. I’d lie in bed, stare at the ceiling, and feel the familiar burning behind my eyes. I willed the tears to evaporate, thought of happy moments, told myself I did not choose sadness. I wanted to prove my mother right—wanted to believe she knew something I didn’t. I wanted to claim control over myself and my body—a connection that felt more tenuous as I grew. But the tears fell, as if I had nothing to do with them at all.
III: Spiritual Tears
As a Mormon, I equated spirituality with tears. If a speaker cried during their talk or lesson, we responded to their emotional vulnerability with reverence. We had all been there; we knew they were overcome with spiritual warmth and confirmation of church-led truth.
When I was young, I wondered when I would finally feel enough to cry in church, and it took me a while to get there. I learned from those around me to attribute tears to answered prayers, and to an understanding of eternal principles taught to me by church leaders. It almost felt like a rite of passage when I finally cried while giving a talk, a short sermon-like lesson, in front of the whole congregation when I was a teenager. But the real test would be my response to reading the Book of Mormon. According to prophets past and present, anyone who reads the Book of Mormon front to back and then prays to ask God if it’s true will get a spiritual confirmation. The confirmation would be personal, something only I understood, but most members reported the feeling of a “burning bosom.” The night I finished the Book of Mormon for the first time, I knelt by my bed and said a simple prayer.
I waited. And waited.
Minutes on end.
I felt nothing.
I sat back, staring at my comforter until I felt hypnotized by its striped pattern. I had to make sense of this; I couldn’t accept no for an answer. I reconsidered the way I’d asked—perhaps it was too casual. I prayed again. I pondered what a “burning bosom” might actually feel like; maybe I’d missed it. I considered my mother’s advice: You choose how you feel. I had never felt the Spirit by a burning sensation—at that point, only my tears had confirmed some sort of spiritual effect. I had been waiting for the wrong feeling.
I prayed again, hoping, hoping. Eyes closed, hands clasped, I willed the tears to fall. I could choose this; I could choose to believe.
I cried—just a few tears, all I could muster. I stood, relieved, and turned off the lamp.
IV: The Weeping Woman in Story
In movies, she weeps from a threat, or from losing a child, or she’s proud of someone. The weeping woman is weakness and love and manipulation all at once. The weeping woman cries for all the women before and after her who will experience womanhood. Her weaknesses and emotional volatility must be overcome, but we must also exemplify her meekness and deep, matronly love.
Our collective folklore repeats stories of weeping women, usually tears rationalized by loss. Banshees howl when family members die. Their eyes are red from constant weeping, and in some iterations, they weep as they wash blood from dead people’s clothing—sometimes from the clothing of people they, the banshees themselves, have killed.
Sirens wail for the distinct purpose of luring men to their deaths. The White Lady prowls the streets, indicating to whoever sees her that a family member will soon die. Sometimes she is kind, telling her victims that the afterlife is a beautiful place, and sometimes she says nothing and floats along in her sadness. La Llorona is cursed to wander seaside towns after drowning her own children, weeping in a white funeral gown.
In Mormonism, one of our greatest speculations is that there must be a Heavenly Mother along with God, our Heavenly Father. Surely, she would exist next to him, helping populate and oversee the world. And yet, in our stories she is fragile. God keeps her hidden because he can’t stand the thought of blasphemy against her—and so she is left out of scripture, and story, and spiritual connection. I often imagined her standing behind him, letting him take the reins, as she was too overcome with sadness at the wickedness of our world.
These women have become lost to their pain, doomed to perpetual depression and in some cases, monstrosity. A consequence for their emotions, they wander, they wash, they withhold, they wail.
V: The Science
For most of my youth, society made me believe only women were allowed to cry. We were emotional. We were empathetic. We were hysterical. We couldn’t help ourselves. But studies about why humans cry are inconclusive: it’s an instinct. Or no, it’s a method of social bonding. But also, it could be a form of manipulation necessary to survival.
Research says there are three types of tears: reflex, continuous, and emotional. The first two are logical, a way to clean and lubricate our eyes, to keep us healthy and alert. The last, emotional, releases endorphins to help ease any physical or emotional pain we might carry.
There is reason to pause if a person never cries, but if a person cries all the time, inhibiting their daily life, that’s also a problem. My tears lay in the middle of the spectrum of worry. Though I wished to be a girl unaffected by the world and the people around me, to choose some sort of apathy, I was deeply in tune with my own feelings about all of it. The mixed messages I received about crying crashed into each other as I tried to understand myself: crying was good, spiritual, embarrassing, cleansing, annoying, ugly, beautiful, ridiculous. It all fell into boxes I didn’t want to inhabit, and scientific reasoning for tears didn’t make crying any better. I felt stuck in a stereotype—one, it seems, no one cares to investigate further.
And then there were the moments I didn’t cry when I was socially contracted to do so. There was a disconnect between body and spirit, body and mind, body and soul. When my mother’s youngest brother died, I just stared and stared at the people crying around me. My mother, inconsolable.
The night he died, I was with friends and one of them needed a ride home. When I found my mother, she was curled up on the couch next to my older sister, weeping. I’d never seen her in such a state—she was strong, unmovable always, and I could not comprehend when she told me through her tears that her brother had been in a car accident. My first instinct was to fix, fix, fix, but she was the mother, and I was the daughter, and so I kept standing where I stood and told her my friend needed to get home.
My memories of my uncle are sporadic. He was quiet, tall, and sometimes looked like his face was shadowed. He would come to our house and steal the TV remote politely, muttering, I think The Simpsons is on. I would write him letters while he was on his church mission. He came over for Christmas one year and my mother laughed as he opened presents full of peanut butter and ramen noodles—staples that could sustain his college experience. We went to his wedding in Oregon where his reception was at a place with mini golf and bumper boats. He died four months after he got married.
I would stare at the wall at night and wonder where he was—if he was in heaven like the adults promised me. Just like I couldn’t comprehend my mother in such an emotional position, I couldn’t comprehend him in such a spiritual one. And then, I’d read the book The Bridge to Terabithia and cry and cry and cry.
Never mind the time that my childhood friend, Connor Fisher, died of cancer at just eight years old. That was a joke—it had to be. All I could do was climb in my mother’s lap and hold her as she cried and cried and cried, and I stared at the way the sun lit up our sitting room—little slats of light full of dust falling, falling, falling.
At the time, I chalked up my hollowness to a knowledge of God’s plan. Though I had trouble picturing the afterlife, I told myself that my uncle and my friend were fine somewhere else and free of pain. But really, I had no idea. I had no way to comprehend that one day someone could be right by you and the next they’d be gone forever. There was no science, no religion, that could make it make sense.
VI: Crying in Public
In high school, the youth of my congregation and neighboring congregations put on the play Savior of the World. There were at least one hundred of us, ages fourteen to eighteen. I got a part singing in the Alleluia Chorus when Jesus Christ rises from the dead in the second act. I loved the music—the chirping high notes of my own scene, the steady rumble of the whole cast singing “Come, Deliver Us.” The songs were stuck in my head that whole summer. We wore long tunics with braided belts, sandals that wrapped up our calves.
The night of our dress rehearsal, the play’s director had the whole cast gather on the stage. She asked the man who played Jesus—a random guy from a random congregation who often stated he felt like a total imposter in the role—to stand in front of us with his hands outstretched.
The director wanted us to experience what Peter experienced when he found Jesus Christ in his resurrected form. She asked us to approach the man one by one to feel his hands, as if they, too, were poked with holes from crucifixion. She was emotional at her own idea, her own rendering of something she felt was so important. She wanted us to feel the same, to fall to our knees, to understand Christ’s sacrifice for ourselves—not just as a tale in a book, but as a reality in our small suburban lives.
For Mormons, this was odd. We’re not a loud religion; we don’t yell at people, telling them they need to be saved; we don’t speak in tongues; we don’t have bands playing live music at church. Though our theology is complicated and caught up in hypotheses and speculation, what was happening on that stage was not a normal occurrence. I was conflicted, sure that this, not my part in the Alleluia chorus, would be the greatest acting I would have to do that weekend. I was up front. The director helped me stand to go first.
I couldn’t look at the man’s eyes. I didn’t want to see how uncomfortable he was, or worse—if he was enjoying the experience. The room was silent, stage lights still shining over us. I wanted to please the director the same way I wanted to please anyone who was in an authoritative position over me. And, even deeper, I wanted to feel that peace she so clearly felt, that so many other people so clearly felt from the church’s teachings. But at that moment, I could not picture anything other than what was happening; my heart beat so fast it felt like my eyes pulsed, too. I touched the man’s outstretched hands—barely, the lightest flit—and avoided eye contact. The director’s assistant led me to the audience seating area, and I sat, ready to wait as almost one hundred other kids got to experience the same thing.
Many of my peers started crying as they approached the pretend Savior. Some kids hugged him. I knew I should be crying, should be feeling something, but I could not conjure any tears. A friend sat next to me after her turn and whispered, That was so cool.
I went home and cried about feeling like an outsider in my own culture, wishing I understood my world the same way my peers did. But I didn’t ascribe any meaning to those tears the way I would have to a spiritual experience. Good tears came from God. Bad tears, lonely tears, frustrated tears came from the world. I was just sad. I understood I was missing something.
I had already started to resent my place as a woman within the larger society. And then I started to resent my place as a woman within Mormonism. I was told repeatedly in church that women are soft and emotional, that femininity was a necessary yin to masculinity’s more important yang. I tried on new public personas, becoming the sarcastic and difficult teenager in the back of church and school classrooms, making fun of myself and the people around me, even when I felt a deep connection to another person’s story. I crossed the line often, but when I was rude, I told others they couldn’t take a joke. When I felt attacked, I used below-the-belt insults to maintain some sort of uncaring power. But at home, in that basement room, I’d agonize over what I had said, writing long journal entries or blog posts about how I didn’t know who I was, and I’d cry about all of it.
In the mornings, my little sister would tell me, I could hear you crying through the vent.
VII: Manipulation
Pick a part of a movie where a character is crying. Forget the context but set the scene. Let’s go with Samwise Gamgee at the end of The Two Towers, staring at the wreckage of Osgiliath. Sam’s sweet dirty face, tear-stained, staring out into the abyss—you can almost hear the movie soundtrack in the background. But change the music and the scene changes: if the music is joyful, upbeat, we see Sam crying joyful tears. If the music is sad, eerie, we see Sam in the depths of despair. Creepy, unnerving music makes him an antagonist.
Humans are so easily swayed. Psychology professor and emotions expert Lisa Barrett suggests Western culture has been incorrect about how emotions work. Our mainstream belief is that emotions are a response to stimuli, a millisecond of thought telling us how to react, and then our body takes over. I see something sad; I cry. I see someone overcome challenges; I cry. I see a puppy make friends with a rooster; I cry. But Barrett claims emotions are learned.
Emotions, she says, actually construct the world.
She claims all the body feels without context is pleasantness, unpleasantness, arousal, and calmness. Everything else is made up just as much as it is real. I feel sad because someone at some point explained what sadness is, based on Western ways of thinking, based on Utah culture, based on Mormon culture. I feel every emotion based on these structures. I was told someone was feeling the Spirit when they cried, and so crying became more than just a response to sadness. I had new reasons to cry—it wasn’t just a natural reaction.
We think of manipulation as negative. I don’t want to be manipulated, or to recognize I’ve manipulated someone else. But sometimes it’s unconscious. Sometimes it’s with good intent. I might buy my husband a chocolate bar because I know it will make him happy, and that’s technically me manipulating his emotions. But when manipulation is purposeful and planned, it feels like betrayal.
Tears are a manipulative weapon and have been used as such throughout history in legal trials, in racist claims, in any situation a person wants something and uses someone else to get it. My own tears can be manipulative. I’ve always cried during arguments with family and with my husband because in these moments, I must be vulnerable to explain myself. I wish I could stay unflappable, but my body betrays me—and I wonder if somewhere down the line I internalized that crying would help in these situations. Family members soften when the tears start falling, and it’s almost frustrating to see the way they’re affected by my emotions, the way it shuts them up. I see how it affects me, too; if they cry with me, I rush to comfort them. Tears ask for empathy in all my cultures.
On the last night of Savior of the World, everyone backstage started crying. My tears, the tears that don’t stop flowing during happy, sad, frustrating, or hilarious moments were nowhere to be found. I was wearing my white angel costume, watching through the curtains at a weeping audience, looking around at weeping peers in the dim backstage lights, looking inside of myself. I was terrified of the fact that I felt absolutely nothing.
I began to pray. Hard. Harder than when I knelt at my bedside looking for an answer to the Book of Mormon’s truthfulness. I didn’t want to make up this experience, to force tears and manipulate myself once more. But I felt this pressure to understand what everyone else understood. I begged God to bless me with tears. I clenched my hands, dug my nails into my palms, thought of the saddest memories I kept hidden away—like the night my uncle died, and my mom curled against my older sister on the couch downstairs, crying like a small child. The last song was about to start. I would have to make my way on stage with everyone else, and the audience would see me as the only angel not crying. I begged God. I bargained.
Tears appeared. I did not feel the same way I usually felt before crying—no stinging eyes, no pressure, no facial contortions. Just tears, silently slipping down my desperate face. I followed the line onto the stage, sang the last song, held my hands up to the sky with the rest of the cast. I was crying, but I was also smiling. If anyone knew me well enough, they’d see the real emotion behind the tears: relief.
I didn’t know how to name the experience. It was so full of hope and terror and loneliness. I had cried plenty of times during church services, during hymns, during church films—it would have been easy to write off this moment as an anomaly if it hadn’t happened a few years prior while praying about the Book of Mormon. I had manipulated myself both times after being manipulated by the church and after being manipulated by the world. I wondered if tears mean anything at all, if I cherry-pick their symbolism to support the narrative I’d been told to believe.
VIII: The Weeping Woman in the Book of Mormon
The weeping woman searches through pages and pages of strong women and weak women, women who make merry and women who weep and wail. She sees herself in all of them and in none of them—most are nameless mothers and wives and daughters and harlots and mistresses trying to survive in the context they live in. They weep for their husbands. For their children. They weep to get what they want. They weep to keep themselves safe.
The weeping woman listens in church. Church tells her that God counts a woman's tears and holds them against the men who caused them. She watches the church separate women from men, put women on a pedestal and then leave them there, high up and alone.
The weeping woman listens to her mother. Her mother tells her to choose her own emotions, to recreate the context and the meaning given to her, to reshape it into something that makes sense.
None of it is enough for the weeping woman. To create order out of something irrational is to create more chaos. Tears are influenced, manipulated, chosen, misunderstood, subjugated. She lives in the pages in her dark basement room, words blurred by her tears.
IV: The Meaning
Right before I left the church, I cried in the shower almost daily. I cried myself to sleep almost nightly. I mourned the loss of my life’s foundation, mourned the fact that my personal beliefs no longer lined up with my culture. I cried to my mother about how confused I was, hoping she’d have an answer that could pull me back to comfort. She was imperturbable in reciting church fallacies—the same we’re all trained to say to anyone questioning—she had no tears, and no answers that would satisfy.
This went on for years. I’d wake up to a puffy face and put frozen peas on my eyes before I went to work. I wished I could stop crying. I wondered how there could possibly be more tears every time they came to me. And I also appreciated them, the meaning I gave them: I didn’t make this decision lightly. They were proof that I tried.
But meaning is made up. I could say in those moments I cried from anger more than sadness and I’d be correct. I could say I cried from relief and that would make sense, too. I cried from loneliness, isolation, betrayal, manipulation, from a period where no one understood what I felt and would actively avoid trying to empathize. It’s all true. Crying is a response to all of it.
My mother cries now if we talk about religion, when she acknowledges my decision to leave is real. To her, religion is logic. My choice is illogical. She chokes on her words, not used to tears flowing so easily. I cry too, seeing the way I’ve made her feel. You can’t make me feel anything, she insists. And yet.
X: Footprints
The most recent time I cried was while staring at the Laetoli footprints on my small phone screen, zooming in on their human but also not human shape. The footprints are 3.6 million years old—a set of small feet walking parallel to a set of large feet. They made me construct a story: a mother and a daughter walking in the same direction, headed who knows where, but one hopes the mother knows the way. They constructed a story of generations past and present, all of us stumbling around making meaning of mundanity and laughing and fighting and crying.
It was just a few tears, produced by creating a story. The story was the meaning behind all things: that these footprints were part of a plan bigger than all of us, created by an omnipotent being with our best interests in mind. The story was a stone woman wailing for eternity, a gendered curse. The story was my own mother’s footprints, and my small footprints diverging. The story was that none of our tears mean anything. The story was that our tears mean everything. My therapist insists tears indicate a larger truth—but which truth? They just exist, I argue. I don’t choose them. But when they appear, I’ll choose what comes next.