My friends almost made me cry the other day. I'll admit I deserved all the teasing they were dishing out, but geez were they hitting below the belt. Let me be clear that I didn't cry - I almost could have possibly been driven to getting offended/upset enough to maybe consider the off chance of crying. In realizing that, I was flung back into the past. I hate having to relive or remember a portion of my life I'd successfully buried and outgrown, but something's always going to help it resurface.

I was the biggest crybaby when I was little. I don't know why, though I'd imagine it started soon after my younger brother was born and I no longer got all the attention I had previously enjoyed. If that's so, it had to have been understandable at the onset because I was only one and a half, but I grew into quite an old crybaby. No, actually I think it started more about the time my brother got bigger than me. I was fine with the whole little brother situation while I was the bigger one and controlled things, but as soon as he grew bigger, the tables were turned and I had no defense other than to run crying to mommy or daddy or anybody who would listen. I can definitely remember still being a crybaby in second grade, and possibly also third. That's just too old for stuff like that. That's almost as sick as the children who breastfeed well into toddlerhood. It was never really stated, but everyone knew I was the crybaby. My friend's did their best to comfort me when I got upset and cried, rather than help me to change and be more adult, like them. Not that it is the responsibility of a seven year old to understand all the various implications of coming to the aide of a friend and choose the path of long-term benefit rather than the path of least resistance.

I remember one day in second grade when a boy teased me about always bring my yellow stuffed dog, Yellow, to school with me. Not that my best friend, Seanna, didn't always bring her orange dog, Orangie, to school and my brother didn't always bring Brownie (yes, you guessed it: a brown dog) with him. So I defended myself as best I could: I cried. As usual, I had Seanna with me to mount a better defense. She didn't waste time on the obvious and point out that she had Orangie and Rose with her (OK, Rose was a white stuffed dog so the naming convention breaks down here, but Seanna was cool enough to be different like that), she went straight for the gut and asked him how he thought he could make fun of me and Yellow when he wore the same Spiderman shirt every single day that week. So then he started crying, too. Victory was mine, but not in the grand scheme of things.

So I persisted in being a crybaby for a long time to come. It was definitely third grade (or rather, the summer after third grade) when I finally crossed over from crybabyhood to mature childhood and I remember the day well. My brother and I were visiting the aforementioned Seanna at her father's house. We were horseplaying and my brother accidentally socked me. This was one of those situations where time suddenly stood still and everything became crystal clear. A religious experience for an eight year old, so to speak. Normally this would have been the split-second in which I started crying hysterically and the horseplay stopped and everyone gathered around to make sure poor little madi was all right. But in my hightened state of conscienceness I had the time to stop and think: do I really need to start crying now? No. Am I hurt? No. Am I in need of comfort? No. Am I being a big fucking baby about all this? Yes. And just like that I made the decision to never cry again. (OK, well "never cry again" is a little strong, but never in the crybaby sense of the word, at least).

I normally don't believe those people who say one can fix things through positive thinking. Maybe to a certain extent and maybe in certain cases for certain special people...like those women who constantly visualize their breasts growing and "miraculously" they increase in size, but only while an excessive amount of blood in flowing to the area...or my friend's uncle who supposedly corrected his vision after being disgusted at the idea of needing reading glasses and meditating his eyes back to normal...but in general it just doesn't ring true. But this was truly a case of just that kind of miracle occuring.

Seanna and my brother just stopped what they were doing and turned to watch me. I'd imagine some sort of beam of prophetic light appeared from nowhere and struck me at that moment, but maybe it didn't. Anyhow, they both knew something was amiss and Seanna said, "aren't you going to start crying? Aren't you hurt?" And I just grinned and looked at her and said, "no, of course not!" And from that moment on, I was no longer a crybaby.

6/9/98