I cried during a pampers commercial yesterday. Or how about this, I cried when Elizabeth Taylor died.

 I'm shocked by these tears, especially the ones that come from happiness. Is this a part of growing old or can I really just chalk it all up to pregnancy hormones? I don't think I want to define everything foreign I feel as hormonal, although sometimes the excuse is nice.

The tears from Elizabeth Taylor's death most literally came from nowhere, and I somehow managed to make them disappear just as they began- swallowing them out of sheer embarrassment. But I was alone during the pampers commercial and decided to let them escape. I felt so much joy and tenderness staring into this tiny infants face looking at me through my TV screen and before I knew it I felt tears rolling down my cheeks. The kind you have to physically feel to really know they're coming from you. I felt almost ashamed of them. I was embarrassed. I let it out. I uttered a couple of choked sobs, loud and broken enough to wake up my pup Roger.

Its how unfamiliar these feelings are that bring on the embarrassment. Its new territory for me. Its how intimate and gentle my emotions have become.

Tears of anger, of rage, of self pity are all much to familiar. I love to drunkenly cry over how someone wronged me. But crying because I'm filled with happiness, oh no, way to uncomfortable.

I remember how uneasy my mom's tears made me as a child. I still am today in certain vulnerable moments. But as a child they were enough to send me into a panic. She was a goddess to me, she was my best friend. She was tender and warm and strong. But even at a very young age I believed I had to protect her. In many ways it felt it was me and her against the world, creating our own manageable universe out of the detestable and broken circumstances we were left with and so because she protected me I knew I had to do the same. From my father, from their fights and from her tears.

We were sitting in the parking garage of my grandmothers work, this is one of those dark and fuzzy childhood memories. A memory that is starting to settle under a haze induced only by time. My grandfather surprises us, my mom shrieks and starts to cry as she runs to him. My heart drops, tears mean something is wrong and I can't allow her to be wronged any longer. I follow her and she explains she is crying because she is happy to see my grandfather, "Oh sweetie, nothings wrong, these are tears of joy."

Crying because of joy? It made no sense to me at the time. It was quite literally such a foreign concept I had to just categorize it under the 'something mothers do.'

So at 22, on a sunny weekday morning, while drinking tea, I meet these 'tears of joy' for the first time. I'm confronted by such a tender love for this human being I will soon meet, that I start to quietly sob. The mere thought of the love I have, the thought of holding Max for the first time and looking at her face made from sprinkled bits of me, exposes something so raw and foreign to me. Absolute unconditional love. Compassion. Pure joy. Whatever it was spawned from, I wont just chalk it up to pregnancy hormones or to something parents do, I just had to be pregnant with my first child to let it all in.