Crying Over Beer & Other Spiritual Awakenings

Tears Over Beers

In all my combined years of watching sappy movies, reading every tear-jerker novel, and belting out emotional lyrics to every heartbreak anthem ever written, I believed I’d built up a solid immunity to emotion. Like a seasoned soap opera viewer, I could witness drama with the cold detachment of a stoic monk.

But January 1994? I was crying like I had a lifetime tear quota to meet. I cried because my beer didn’t taste right. I cried because my beloved Diet Pepsi suddenly made my stomach turn like a telenovela plot twist. I cried because my treasured Indigo Girls CD now sounded less like soul-soothing folk and more like screeching alley cats. I cried because my favorite perfume—Beautiful, ironically—smelled like three-week-old garbage marinated in jasmine.

Clearly, I was not okay. This embarrassing unraveling had me questioning everything.

As I trudged through the snow toward my grandparents’ house, I wasn't just slipping on the ice—I was sliding into full-blown existential meltdown. If I couldn’t handle my CD collection turning against me, how was I supposed to handle motherhood? What if this baby noshed on all my brain cells and I ended up living under a bridge, surviving off dirty yellow snow and regret?

Still mid-freakout, I knocked on Grandma’s side door. So lost in my spiral of doom, I barely noticed my cousin Jill appearing out of nowhere just as Grandma opened the door and ushered us both in. I thought I was there to seek refuge. Instead, I walked straight into a full-blown spiritual tribunal.

For the next 20 minutes, Grandma launched into a passionate sermon about the church’s covenants, the ones I had clearly broken, and how this would all affect the poor, innocent soul growing inside me. Meanwhile, Jill—sensing an opening—casually dropped her own scandal into the mix: “I’m getting a divorce.”

Grandma didn’t even blink. She was so busy trying to save me from eternal damnation that Jill’s little bomb just floated by unnoticed.

At the time, I couldn’t translate Grandma’s fire as love, or the church’s rules as anything other than a set of rigid, soul-sucking restrictions. I felt judged, shamed, and completely unseen. So I did what any self-respecting hot mess would do: I distanced myself.

But here’s the twist—the good kind. The kind that makes you stop mid-sentence and whisper, “Wait, what?”

Nine months later, when Tanner was placed in my arms for the first time, something shifted. It wasn’t just a hormonal tsunami—it was a full-on soul awakening. Suddenly, I saw everything differently. I wasn’t weak. I was strong. Strong enough to feel it all, carry it all, and keep showing up. Grandma wasn’t trying to control me—she was trying to fortify me. The church? Not a prison, but a path. Guideposts I didn’t know how to use until I had someone who’d be walking the road behind me.

And the “mistake”? It wasn’t a mistake at all. It was the moment the universe delivered me the purest magic it had to offer.

Love.

The real kind. The kind that reorders your soul and makes you see every narrative you’ve ever been handed through a new lens. The kind that introduces you to the second most powerful force on Earth:

Hope.

Love and hope—those two, when paired—can carry you through anything. They remind you that you matter. That your story matters. And that sometimes, the moment you think your world is unraveling… is actually the exact moment it’s coming together.

That’s the power of story. And the catch? We rarely hear it clearly the first time. Or the second. Sometimes, it takes falling apart—just enough—to finally hear what’s been whispering beneath the noise all along.

The truth doesn’t change. We do.

So tell your story. Then tell it again. Listen deeply. Because one day, you’ll realize…

It wasn’t just a story you were telling.

It was the one that was remaking you.