A friend of mine and I decided that small children are like some sort of emotional satellite dish: they intensify and reflect any emotion going on around them. Get excited and they start bouncing off the walls. Get frustrated and they become angry, sullen little creatures. Get upset and they end up an inconsolably weeping blob.
That last scenario happened to me last night when I took my son to see "Toy Story 3." I was crying near the end of the movie because (spoiler alert!) Andy -- the kid whose toys we've loved for years now -- had grown up was and heading off to college.
As a mom, I was crying, not because the movie's terribly sad or anything, but because I was envisioning my own 5 year old in years to come packing up his room and driving off with an old car stuffed to the gills with stuff.
(Side note: A woman in front of us in line at the concession stand just before the movie warned me that I was going to cry. Perhaps I should hunt her down and apologize for mentally rolling my eyes and scoffing at the very notion. At the very least, I send out apologetic karma, wherever you are, lady in the purple shirt.)
My son saw the tears streaming down my cheeks and immediately burst into tears himself. He crawled into my lap and cried and cried while my own tears, coming on even harder now that my sweet little son was crying in my lap (OK, maybe I'M the emotional satellite), trickled down onto his hair.
Once the movie was over, I asked him what made him sad, and, predictably, he didn't really have an answer because there wasn't anything in there that would make a child feel sad.
"It just made me sad," he said. And the very act of saying that short sentence would bring on his waterworks again.
Emotional satellite, I'm telling you.
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