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Health & Fitness

Kryptonite found on the Fourth of July?

I view my husband as a patient and proud man. He is our Superman. He does have one small bit of kryptonite though. Me, I would make an awesome superhero -- I have no kryptonite... Right?

I view my husband as a patient and proud man. He holds himself and most others to high standards and has no tolerance for drama.

He is our Superman.

Ummm...

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He does have one small bit of kryptonite though...

Huge brown eyes decorated with long lovely eyelashes...

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Fill those eyes with tears and he melts.

Me, I would make an awesome superhero -- I have no kryptonite...

My youngest daughter Faith cries constantly. She is an overflowing bucket of emotion. She cries at the injustice she faces with her brothers, she cries about the amount of chicken she must consume at dinner, she cries about wind blowing in the wrong direction and she cries when she finds dead ladybugs.

My eldest daughter, Lily is not so much the tenderfoot her sister is. She is a bit hardier. However, Lily has been caught curled up on the couch sobbing over movies alongside her ridiculously sentimental mother. Lily cannot listen to “American Honey” by Lady Antebellum without her eyes filling up and quite often (especially lately) she does her best to blink away the tears when she becomes frustrated with the perceived injustice of  being part of a large family -- fighting to carve out her own space while simultaneously becoming a teenager.

Yes, it can be pretty awful. The tears send the men in my house into a tail spin.

We girls are definitely brought more easily to tears than my boys are. I am constantly hugging, consoling or sending my daughters off to their rooms to get a hold of their uncontrolled irrational spurts of emotion.

Some days it drives me a bit crazy. Crying can be quite time consuming especially when you cannot predict when the emotional meltdown will take place. And this typically happens when we are in a time crunch with appointments looming on the horizon.

I cannot say that I am not a tender heart. The girls certainly come by this well.  I am brought to tears of both joy and sadness fairly easily, and I embrace it, because it is who I am , it’s how I’m wired and it’s part of my charm.

At least I think so...

I think back to the things that have triggered such emotional responses from me and shake my head…

My poor parents.

I remember the confused, concerned and slightly amused look that spread across the face of my grandfather as I giggled and wept at the sight of my new ten speed bike – a gift for my thirteenth birthday.

All throughout my teenage years I  curled up on the couch and cried at countless sit-coms and television series finales. The Cosby Show  – horrible. Family Ties – I sobbed for days.

I won’t even begin to discuss Moonlighting…

Let’s talk music… Embarrassingly enough the triggers here could range from the Scorpion’s  performing “Wind of Change” to Billy Joel’s, “Always a Woman.”

And although my musical sobbing sessions most certainly were therapeutic – I still look back to those teenage days and find it difficult to imagine that I could not get through the first three lines of “With You All the Way” by New Edition without grabbing a box of tissues and curling up with my stuffed animals.

Like I said -- my poor parents.

Anyways, much to our dismay Faith found a new thing to cry about over the last couple of days – fireworks.

As we looked across the river and watched as the residents of Marshfield and Scituate lit off a display celebrating our country and our freedom in brightly luminous and exhilarating bursts of light, Faith whimpered and looked to her parents with tear streaked cheeks.

My husband attempted to distract her, to talk her out of her emotional response… But with failed efforts he eventually just patted her on the shoulder and turned his attention to the boys of the group – who were cheering an shouting.

Faith found my lap. She crawled up under my chin; I covered us with a blanket and hugged her.

My husband looked back at us and he grabbed my foot and gently tapped it, shook his head when he looked at Faith’s face and silently drew his thoughts back to the fireworks display.

Faith and I sat there together with our family, both of us overwhelmed by the spirit of the event, the beauty of the display, the energy of it all -- silently sobbing….

And so it is discovered that I too have found my kryptonite...

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