I have always been an emotional and sentimental person.
When I was young, I teared up at every touching scene at the movies. I felt a lump in my throat when I heard songs with lyrics that spoke to my heart. I cried when I had an argument with my mum or the then-boyfriend, knowing that it would not help to solve things at all. It's not that I am frail - I like to think I am pretty tough after three births without epi and 11 years of being a stay-at-home mum. It's just that crying has been, and still is, a way for me to release stress, to feel and let go of my emotions, to be better able to pick myself up and emerge stronger after.
Thus, when I heard myself saying recently to one of the kids "Why must you cry over such a small thing?", I wanted to give myself a big, hard kick afterwards. In the first place, what is trivial in my eyes, like not being able to find a pair of socks or forgetting where they put one particular pencil even though there are dozens of others, might be a huge matter to them, especially in that very moment. Who am I to judge or to tell them they ought to hold it in instead of letting it out? Of all people, I should understand not just because I've been through it but also because I'm their mum a.k.a the person they trust most in the world.
It really got me thinking for quite some time. Still, I didn't sit down to have a talk with them on this subject. That was, until this incident happened.
