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I had a major meltdown last week. I should have known it was coming. I'd been accumulating a bunch of stuff worth crying about for a quite awhile. Then early that morning, I got up to let our 10-week-old puppy out and stepped right into a squishy pile of poop. Barefoot. A couple hours later, I was putting away a wooden painting easel and painfully pinched my finger in the hinge. That did it. I started crying.

"What's wrong, Mom?" my adult daughter asked, coming into the room and surprising me.

I quickly turned away, trying to hide my tears.

"It's OK to cry," she said gently.

Even in my pain, I didn't miss the impact of this full-circle moment. Those are the very words I used to tell her when she was growing up. But somehow that message didn't fit for me. Kids can cry, but moms don't cry—at least not in front of their children. That seemed to be my own unwritten rule.

My meltdown moment felt awkward as I tried to explain my tears to my daughter, mumbling something about my injured finger and the messy poop. But she knew and I knew, I was crying about more than that.

Crying is a personal thing. Most of us are born crying, but in the journey of growing up, we become more aware of our choices about when and where to cry. Some people cry often and easily in front of others. I mostly cry alone—except when I watch a sad movie, which is always a great excuse to have a good cry in public.

Hiding my tears is a habit I started when our children were young. I wanted to protect them from seeing me cry so they wouldn't worry about me or feel responsible for my feelings. So I learned to stuff my feelings and save my crying for alone times. And our children learned that mommies don't cry.

"Do you remember seeing me cry very often when you were growing up?" I asked my daughter a few days after my meltdown.

She hesitated a moment. "Only when Dottie (my mother) died," she answered.

Surely she forgot about my other less-memorable cries, but I wondered what my lack of crying meant to her now.

"I didn't know what made you really sad," she said.

Her answer reminded me of a story another young mother told me recently. One Saturday morning, she fixed a great breakfast for her four children. Pancakes, eggs, sausage and fresh fruit. She kept putting food on the serving plates and cleaning up as she went. But when it came time for her to sit down and enjoy some breakfast, the food was all gone. She looked around at her children cleaning their plates and suddenly her tears came.

Wide-eyed, the children watched Mommy cry, a near non-occurrence in their home. She told them why she was crying and then went to her room. Soon there was a quiet knock on the door. One by one the children came in. "Sorry, Mom," they all said with hugs.

Unexpectedly, her tears brought about a tender teachable moment.

If I were to do my mothering years over again, I probably wouldn't be so careful to hide my tears. Not that I would openly sob every time I felt sad. Kids don't need that. But maybe I'd be more honest about the reality that moms have feelings. And when we feel sad, "It's OK to cry."

What Every Mom Needs Tip: (Help) Help is available for us as moms. But getting help means connecting with the people in our lives …. and then asking those people for help. Before we reach a crisis point. Before we lose it. Before we get angry or start crying.

We also need to ask for help clearly and specifically. For instance, we often assume a spouse should notice that we need help. When he doesn't, we might bang the pots and pans a little louder while making dinner, hoping to motivate him to action. We canACT our way to help. We have to ASK our way to help, putting our requests into words. —Carol Kuykendall, from What Every Mom Needs by Elisa Morgan and Carol Kuykendall (Zondervan, 2006) available in the MOPShop at www.MOPShop.org.

Carol Kuykendall is a Consulting Editor for MOMSense magazine.

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