The Subtle Art of Calling Your Mom Crying

by Ashley Powers

I can handle it, you tell yourself as tears escape from your eyes and run down your face. I shouldn’t bother her, you think, but then you remember that you feel better every time you call your mom crying. 

Maybe it’s not your mom, maybe your tearful call is to your best friend, your therapist, a sibling, or even a significant other. Unless you’re the first perfect person to ever exist, most of us need a pressure relief valve for when life builds up inside us, and mine just happens to be calling my mom.

Breakdowns can happen for any reason, it could be a job setback, it could be problems with a significant other, maybe you’re about to start your period, or maybe you have no idea what it is. 

Our feelings somehow become an overwhelming force that we can’t face ourselves. Yet, we simultaneously feel badly pulling anyone else into the emotional twister we find ourselves in. It’s hard not to feel like a burden when we call out for the help of someone else, but if the roles were reversed we know we’d do the same for our loved ones in a heartbeat. That’s what unconditional love is about anyway.

See, burdens are like a pizza or cake, they’re meant to be shared. As much as we want to take them on all by ourselves, I can almost guarantee your insides will feel sicker not sharing. Or maybe they’re like a large piece of furniture, we think we can carry it all by ourselves, but calling in a helper makes it infinitely easier and reduces the chances of self injury.

So, you make your tearful calls to your person. Sometimes for advice, sometimes just asking for someone to listen. And they reassure you that you’re not a loser, and that life can be hard but you’re doing a great job handling it. For a moment you see yourself through their eyes, and suddenly don’t feel so small because it’s not just you facing your challenges, you have people on your team.

Usually they can tell right away by the tone of your voice. Sometimes the first words out of your mouth manifest as sobs, but by the end of the call you feel better and wonder why you even doubted calling them in the first place. Finally, you can take a deep breath and carry on with your day.

Our twenties are tough, and the thought that we’re supposed to be grown up and self-sufficient can make needing the help of others feel like a setback. But being strong doesn’t always mean handling it on your own, sometimes it means reaching out and relieving the pressure. After all, letting all that pressure build is setting us up for an explosion.

So let’s take it as a lesson to not be so hard on ourselves. That “perfect” person we compare ourselves to is probably calling their mom crying too. I mean, after all, we’re all just twentysomething-year-old-teenage-girls anyway. So make that call, and don’t feel bad about it for a second because even the strongest soldiers need their mommies sometimes.