Camp Confidential: a Surprise Tween Tear Jerker

I had just settled into the couch with a deep sigh of contentment when I heard the crying. The sobs were loud and emotional, clearly more than a few preschooler nightmare whimpers. I put the remote back down and reluctantly started peeling off my warm blanket to investigate, wondering if someone had fallen out of bed. Then I heard the feet, clomping down the stairs.

Bella walked into the room, tears streaming down her face. She clutched a paperback in one hand, and was ineffectively rubbing her eye with the other. I looked up at her, completely confused.

"What happened? What's wrong? Is there an animal in your room? A bee? A mouse? Did something fall on you? Are you hurt?"

She was crying so hard that she couldn't answer at first. Instead, she just crawled onto my lap, just as she used to when she was three years old. I held her long tween body, rubbed her back through her flannel peace pajamas, felt her sobs subside slowly as she leaned into me. It had been a long time since I held her that way.

Finally she looked up at me, and explained with a sad smile, "My book is just so sad. It just finished and it was so sad. It can't end like that! It's just too sad!"

And that was all she was able to say before beginning to cry again. As I walked her back up to her bed, I asked if I could borrow the book so we could talk about it together in the morning. Then her tears finally stopped.

When I walked back downstairs towards the comfort of the TV room couch, I wiped away one of my own tears. Mine were tears of joy. Joy that one of my children shares my love of reading, and got to experience the cathartic release of a good book cry. There's nothing like being moved to tears by the creation of characters and plot of a really good writer, someone who makes a story so vivid that you can't help but cry your heart out. I've cried on the plane, on the subway, and even in hiding in my office cube just so I could get through the last few pages of a great book.

There's nothing like a good book cry.

I'm not sure if Camp Confidential: Suddenly Last Summer will bring me to tears, but I hope that Bella's gesture, that handing over of a treasured book, is the first of many shared mother daughter reading experiences.