Every Tuesday night my wife watches a show called “This Is Us” and like everybody else I know that watches it, every Tuesday night she cries. I get home from work about halfway through, change my clothes, pour a drink, and spend the next thirty minutes or so catching up on e-mails, Facebook, and any comments that have been left on the blog.
What I don’t ever do is make fun of her. Part of the reason for this is self-preservation of course. I know that to intentionally antagonize her while she is emotional is to risk that emotion quickly turning to wrath directed my way. The other part is that I’m not someone who should be slinging that particular stone, something that she would have no hesitance to remind me.
I’d like to blame it on fatherhood but the truth is that it never really took a whole lot to get these eyes leaking. Books, movies, songs, and television shows, I’ve cried to them all. Bonnie Raitt singing “I Can’t Make You Love Me”, Johnny’s final moments in The Outsiders, Illyana Rasputin’s death in Uncanny X Men 303. It doesn’t matter how many years pass or how many times I experience these moments, the result is the same.
actual picture of me watching TV
What fatherhood has done is to add exponentially to the number of times that I embarrass myself. Any country song with a guy singing about his daughter and I’m done. Instead of waiting for Forrest Gump to bury Jenny to need a tissue, I’m grabbing the box the first time he meets Little Forrest. My wife and I recently started watching the first season of The Missing on Starz and I honestly don’t know what the hell I was thinking. Our DVR is full of pirates, vikings and witches that need catching up on with much less emotional distress involved.
If you haven’t seen the movie Intersteller yet but think that you might, it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to stop reading now. You also should go watch it, because it’s a fantastic movie. I finally got around to seeing it this week and can’t believe I waited that long.
I’m also glad that when I did watch it, I was by myself. If you are still here than you know that it’s also an incredibly long movie, the first act used to establish the relationship between Matthew McConaughey’s character and his children, especially with his young daughter. His leaving of these children in an attempt to save humanity and his goal of returning to them are what makes the movie a great one instead of just a somewhat clever space movie with a pointless Matt Damon cameo and a really weird ending.
It’s a movie about a parent, sacrificing for his children and it had me blubbering multiple times. I won’t give too much more away in case there are some that stuck with me past the spoiler warning, but I’ll leave you with these lines, delivered as he tried to console his daughter before leaving:
Now we are just here to be memories for our kids…once you are a parent you’re the ghost of your children’s future.
sniff.
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This post was previously published on ThirstyDaddy and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Talk to you soon.
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Photo credit: Jeremy Barnes
The post Confession of a Cry Baby appeared first on The Good Men Project.