Over the years, I've seen and shed tears of many kind:  There's the tears of sadness at the prospect (or actuality) of losing someone, whether through a break-up or the passing of a loved one. These situations are truly sad and the situation is almost always a permanent thing. Yes, sometimes they'll come back (I'm talking about the other half of a break-up, here). Hard to bare though it is -- and often remains -- over time you become used to it because you have it; because it doesn't go away.  There's the happy tears, the tears of joy that visit us when life is good. They might manifest themselves when the you see the beautiful blushing bride who is so "beautiful" that you cannot believe your eyes and you feel nothing but elation for this soon-to-be-legal couple. Another example is at the end of a really lovely film in which you are deeply and positively moved by the characters whose happiness is finally achieved. These are easy tears because they are contextually associated with something sweet. Too bad they are typically so often short-lived...  The terribly (tiny) tears, and the motivation for my post, are those that come from my children when they are in real, prolonged pain. I say real and prolonged because most of their tears are for relatively little things - a bump, a bruise, the undesired ending a play-date, bath-time, etc. Those tears are real at the time no doubt but they don't last long unless there's something else going on beneath the surface. The tears I'm talking about here are the unremitting sobs, the wailing that comes in waves and finds a way to slice you in half not only because of the excruciating volume and the horrid sight of your child in agony but, also, because you know that you can only provide slight comfort and access to a doctor but nothing more. No matter how hard you try, you can't make the pain go away. This is the feeling of helplessness and it stinks.  I experienced this kind of fear and frustration this morning as our youngest woke the household and our neighbors with a screech that would have given Orson Wells a week of sleeplessness. We sprinted to her crib, sliding on our wooden floors along the way like circus clowns, pulled her out and did all the diagnostic stuff we learned after a decade of watching ER on TV. Her left eye was swollen shut from inflammation and from being rubbed too much by her own little hand. We woke our doctor at 7:24AM and will know, definitively, at 12:30PM that she has very lightly scratched her cornea (my wife's call; she's always right).  As the time ticks by, the tears thank goodness have lessened and the screaming has all but stopped. While still an hour away from our appointment and a definitive diagnosis, the steroidal cream our doctor called in to the 24/7 pharmacy seems to have done the trick. Sadie has just walked into my open office wearing a light green princess dress (she is Princess Fiona, after all, and this is what princesses wear). She hands me a red, wooden ball that she calls "ice cream" and asks me if I like it. I tell her I do. She then shows me a new dance she's invented before flittering away with the memory of anguish now forgotten. What follows are baby tears, mine this time...