The Call of a Cry
Do you ever wonder why a person’s first vocal form of communication is a cry?
I sat up just before dawn, a newly breastfeeding mother of only a few days, listening to my baby cry for the demand of nursing. My partner, tired and delirious, jumps out of his sleep to figure out what’s wrong and what he can do but discovering that not much can be done by him when mama has what she needs and baby just needs mama to feed. I begin submitting more and more to the tone of her cry, the rawness, and also wonder of the purpose to a baby’s main line of communication, being a cry. In a world where if you are not a baby, crying is something considered irritating, unnecessary, and even pitiful, I wonder what reason would it be that we have all done this thing before and in our origin, as a way to have our needs met.
Empathy, I suppose.
In order to truly nurture a baby’s development, you must empathize with the call of the cry and the needs that cause them. Something inside of a person that takes care of a baby, has to know that this cry is less about dramatics and vocal testing and more about life and death. If the call of the cry isn’t met with solution and empathy, a baby could go without their needs being met, leading to neglect, abandonment, and trauma. So where does this treatment end and how is the lesson carried out to then show the baby that one day, the crying will no longer work the same and the needs at hand must be handled independently? The life and death factor of the calling cry remains acknowledged only as long as the person is in the margin of adolescence.
Are we teaching people, by answering the cry of babies with swiftness and ignoring the cry of a grown up, that there’s only so much time and space to be nurtured before we are fending for ourselves? Is it a disservice to our collective growth to initially serve a person through the call of their cry then turn away from them if they continue on for too long in their life? What if the needs were never met?
How many babies whose cries have been ignored grow up to lack empathy for others due to neglect, abandonment, and trauma? Do those people outnumber the latter? Should we be reminding ourselves that we’ve all been vulnerable babies desperately needing to be nurtured and cared for and the call of a cry was once the only way to be served? How have we become a world that turns away from the calls of cry from anyone other than babies? Isn’t a need a need, regardless of who it comes from?
These are the questions that run through my mind as I feel the flow of milk run through my breast while I feed my beautiful and hungry newborn daughter just before dawn. My heart is one that yearns for the acknowledgment of all people’s trauma, on some all trauma matters ish. The belief is that all people are created well and good with the pureness and blessing that is breath itself. Only the trauma that comes from being neglected or abandoned in any way in the earliest development causes toxicity to the person’s being and is then carried throughout their lives unless healed.
Maybe if we were as present with all people as we are with babies, there would be more of an urgency to heal trauma in all people instead of picking and choosing whose needs get to be met and who deserves to be condemned for calling out and the tone of such. Before we are given labels and identities, we all inherit a method for communicating that requires others to feel something within that leads them to figure out the best way to serve us without us speaking words to them. We are all destined to cry and hopefully someone is there to empathize.
