Questions Nobody Warned Me About, Part 7: The Dad Who Cries

I am, it turns out, a person who cries at things now.

I did not used to be. I was a reasonably stoic person — not suppressed, not emotionally unavailable, but not particularly given to tears outside of specifically extreme circumstances. I had cried at my grandmother's funeral. I had cried once during a period of significant professional stress when the stress had been going on long enough to overflow. These were, in my pre-children experience, the kind of events that warranted it.

Since Ellie was born I have cried at:

A Pixar film about a Mexican boy and his dead great-great-grandfather. An advert for a supermarket, which I will not name, that involved a father-daughter dynamic and a Christmas meal. Ellie singing a song at her nursery's Christmas concert, off-key, with complete seriousness. The moment Sam said "Dada" for the first time, deliberately and directly at me. A video of a different child — someone else's child, someone I have never met — taking her first steps, that a friend sent me.

I am, apparently, responding to an entirely new frequency of things.

The physiological explanation

I looked this up, because I was genuinely curious and slightly concerned, and also because looking things up is how I process experiences.

There is evidence that parenthood changes the emotional responsiveness of adults in a measurable, neurological way. Specifically: oxytocin levels, which are elevated in new parents and particularly in parents who are doing hands-on caregiving, make the emotional system more sensitive to certain kinds of stimulus — particularly stimuli that involve children, connection, vulnerability, and the passage of time.

The Pixar film, the Christmas concert, the first steps video — these are all, in some sense, stimuli of this type. They involve small people being vulnerable, or progressing, or connecting to adults who love them. My nervous system, apparently, has been recalibrated to find this category highly significant.

This is not weakness. This is my brain responding appropriately to the actual value of the things it is perceiving. What I find myself crying at are things that are, in fact, worth being moved by. I was previously less responsive to them. I am not sure the previous setting was better.

The masculinity piece

I want to address this because it is present, even if I am trying to hold it lightly.

I was raised in a culture — general, British, male, of a certain generation — in which the visible expression of emotion by men was a category of potential embarrassment. Not forbidden exactly. But notable. There was a range of acceptable expressions and they were calibrated more narrowly for men than for women, and crying at a supermarket advert was well outside the acceptable range.

I am aware of this framing. I am also increasingly aware that it is a framing rather than a truth, and that the framing costs something. What it costs, specifically, is the signal fidelity of your own emotional responses — the capacity to receive information from your own reactions accurately rather than filtering them through an inherited standard about what is appropriate to feel.

My son is two. He cries freely and completely, with no filters, and the information content of his crying is extremely high — you always know exactly what he is feeling and it is resolved rapidly. He has not yet acquired the framing.

I am trying to be less committed to the framing than I was at 39. I am trying to let the things that are worth crying at be things I cry at.

The Pixar film

The film is Coco. I had seen it before children and thought it was a good film. I watched it again when Ellie was three and had to leave the room at the end.

I have since watched it again and left the room again.

If you have seen Coco and you are an older parent and you are reading this thinking "yes, I know exactly what you are describing" — I see you. The frequency it is transmitting on is the one about being remembered, and time, and the specific love of a parent for a child, and it is transmitting directly at the thing that has been recalibrated.

Claire finds this very funny. I find it funny too. We watch it on a Saturday afternoon and by the end I am reliably compromised and she is handing me a cup of tea with the expression of someone who has accepted that this is simply how things are now.

She is not wrong. This is simply how things are now.