News and Politics

The Language Of Tears

For the boy in the back seat and all the other children who have born witness

Photo from Reuters by David Dee Delgado

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“The night the baby died in her father’s arms
trying to cross an ocean, our children slept.
It is easy to list off platitudes. To write down
every time we cupped a spider in our hands
and let it out the door. There are many poems
about the seasons, less about the time it takes
to bury another child. It’s true—

history has taught us to be good to children,
to treat the earth as a living place. To stand on
the side of every man and every woman who
begs to land in the same green grass as you.”

~Kate Baer

The first language of the human experience is tears. When a baby is born, we hold our breath until we hear their first cry—a proclamation of life as their lungs fill with air and the world floods their senses. The earliest tears signal joy and relief to new parents. Then, when the baby is placed on our skin, both child and adult fall naturally into synchrony; the heart rate of each steadies, tears resolve, and the tension of those first moments melts away.

We become parents in these earliest instances of connection and care, as we ourselves are soothed by our capacity to offer comfort.

Over the first year of a child’s life, we learn the nuances of tears. We become adept at distinguishing hungry cries from tired cries, and cries of pain from cries of protest. The parental need to respond to and resolve the distress of our children runs deep within our biology. Our most primitive neurological systems—the same systems that keep our hearts beating and our breath flowing—are activated by our children’s tears. For months this is the only method of communication we have, and throughout life we all fall back into this first language when both joy and sorrow cause our words to fail.

Early childhood teachers also become fluent in the language of tears. We can identify a child by the particular tone of their cry, and we can distinguish instinctively between an array of causes by attending to cadence and pitch.

It was with this particular ear, the ear of a parent and of a preschool teacher, that I listened to the full seven and a half minutes of tears that made their way across social media, into press briefings, and onto the House floor in 2018. The sound of immigrant children in detention in Texas, alone and terrified. I remember listening, and then forcing myself to listen again, because these tears were not part of the typical range.

These were not cries of anger or hunger or sadness or even of fear. These sobs were too quiet, too drawn out, and too low. Gradually, a memory from my earliest days of teaching began to surface, and the sound came into focus. This was bereavement. These cries were the soft, low, wavering moans of children in mourning. And, in recognizing this particular sound, I also knew with chilling certainty what would eventually follow: silence.

Crying is an act of hope and connection. It conveys a visceral belief, however strained and seemingly alone we may feel, that someone will hear and understand. Tears of mourning in young children, though, can signal the dangerous onset of surrender, and such surrender defines the most extreme parameters of trauma.

This is the reason 540 organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, the Children’s Defense Fund, and the National Association for the Education of Young Children, came together in 2018 to issue an open letter objecting to the treatment of immigrant children at our borders. Nothing justifies the perpetration of this collective childhood mourning, a wound that we recognized then would undoubtedly have lasting repercussions, not only for the children and their parents, but also for the world they would inhabit.

Eight years later, we are living in that world. And we continue to initiate children into this universe of mourning.

Liam Conejo Ramos in his blue bunny hat. The children of Dilley Detention Center, whose grief-stricken crayon drawings were confiscated for the clarity of the accusations they laid bare—children often resort to drawing when the words are too unfathomable to hold. And just this week in New York, Oscar Belgal’s five-year-old son, who watched from the back seat as seven rounds were fired at his dad. His mom has told officials that he has stopped talking. The silence of surrendering to the unimaginable.

Every time a child is witness to the worst cruelties of humanity, we respond as though the horror of this moral breach is anomalous. We proclaim our shock at the specific cruelty of enacting violence while children look on. We make symbols of their most innocent accessories—a fuzzy hat, a small pair of shoes, a blood-stained backpack. We act as though this is where we will draw the line. Never again, we say. Every child is ours. For now.

Inevitably, there is always another child, though. Another bright red line drawn in crayon. More tears. More silence, theirs and ours.

Just as the cries of little Liam, and the children in detention, and Oscar Belgal’s son ring with a pitch that is both unnatural and unacceptable, so too did the pleading tears of Diamond Reynolds, who sat in the back seat of Philando Castile’s car in 2017, begging her mother to silence her own grieving sobs, so she would not “get shooted.” This four-year-old hugged her mother and wiped away her tears with her small fingers, whispering, “I could keep you safe.” What followed were the same sounds of mourning that could be heard in the tents of Texas.

We’ve also heard the increasingly common sounds of children mourning in the aftermath of school shooting after school shooting. With the same fortitude we’ve heard in the voices of some of the children in Texas, who managed to summon the resolve, even in their grief, to ask to make phone calls, and in the voice of Diamond Reynolds as she comforted her mother, teens across the country have moved through their grief and fear to call us to task. They've begged adults to take responsibility for their right to safety.

And, of course, children bear witness to our worst atrocities each day globally. In Ukraine, they write poetry and plays, trying to give voice to the experiences we adults strain to avoid acknowledging. In Gaza, they enact funeral processions for their dolls.

We must continue to allow ourselves to feel shocked at the brutality we routinely inflict upon children. As Toni Morrison said:

“I insist on being shocked. I’m never going to become immune. I think that’s a kind of failure, to see so much of it that you die inside.”

We should continue to be shocked; these realities ought to shatter our conscience. But we should not pretend, each time, that the mourning of children, or the indifference to their presence when violence is enacted, is unique or unprecedented. As we listen selectively with each new story, children are crying out to us in an echoing chorus.

I’ve written previously that I once heard a poet ask a mother with a crying baby not to step out of a theater where he was reading poems. “A crying baby is a tuning fork for the world,” he called to her.

If this is true, it’s not enough to listen to each child’s individual cry and to denounce their individual grief. It’s not enough to say each time, this is unacceptable, as if it were the first child's tears. We have to listen more closely and attend to the way one child’s tears always catch the thread of so many other wails of mourning. We have to listen for the choir of sorrow. We have to listen for the silence that follows. And as we listen to that silence, we must step into its breach, resolved to offer repair and to do everything in our power to lessen the likelihood of more children's tears.

As Hannah Arendt warned, it is in our actions on behalf of children that “we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.” Children from all corners of our country and beyond are calling out for us to take responsibility. Let us be awakened by the chorus of their cries and promise not to pretend each child’s tears are the first we’ve heard.

It is not unique for children to bear witness. Oscar Belgal’s five-year-old was not the first. There are always children watching. Every time, every bullet fired, a child is watching and pleading with us not to forget again.

Wishing you the courage to attend to the language of children’s tears, to hear the echo of all the other children bearing witness, and to stand between them and the next grief,

Alicia

P.S. If you have not yet seen the guest essay on humane schooling, published in Benjamin Riley's Cognitive Resonance newsletter last week, I'd love for you to read it. The humanity with which we educate children is not disconnected from the violence we tolerate in their lives.

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