On a recent sunny day, I joined a group of preschoolers on the playground and noticed one of them (I'll call her Mary) was crying. When I asked what was wrong, she said she missed her dog. I knew Mary had a dog that died several months ago. She'd had a few rough days since then, but it seemed unusual to me that she might still be this sad months later.

After confirming with her regular teacher (I’m support staff) that this was indeed the same dog to which she was referring, I offered her a hug and said something like, "I'm sorry you're sad. Losing a pet can be really tough." She accepted my words of condolence and the hug but kept crying, loudly and inconsolably, for another 10 to 15 minutes straight. We made it safely inside, ate lunch, and got ready for nap, but Mary continued to cry off and on for over an hour.

I have dozens of tools for kids to work through hard emotions, but none of them were working, and I was beginning to lose my patience. I shared my frustrations with my co-teacher, who at my request agreed to take the lead with Mary that afternoon. Why was Mary’s crying making me feel so uncomfortable?

After some reflection, it hit me: my discomfort wasn't really about Mary feeling sad, or even my inability to help console her. Mary reminded me of myself at that age. Heck, Mary reminded me of myself during my divorce, and last week when I spilled cranberry juice on myself. Things that wouldn't normally rattle me felt overwhelming. She showed me parts of myself I don't always like, or more accurately, parts others have said they don't like, that I internalized. Showing a lot of emotion has not historically been socially acceptable in American culture and apparently, somewhere along the way, I bought into that.

I cry a lot. I cry when I'm happy, when I'm sad, when I'm frustrated because the words won't come out fast enough. I cry because I'm an emotional person, and so is Mary. It took me the better part of 50 years to see that being emotional isn't a weakness, it's a strength. Even though our society hasn't typically valued "emotional" people, my 30-plus years of leading and training children and adults have taught me otherwise: people don't care what you're saying unless you care. And I care deeply.

Here's what I want Mary to learn one day, and what I'm still learning to embody myself: crying, naming what you feel out loud, is not weakness. Getting those emotions off our chest and out into the world is how we work through them. Mary didn't need to stop crying to be okay. She needed permission to feel it all the way through. And when I told my co-teacher I'd reached my limit and asked her to step in, I wasn't checking out. I was doing the same thing I hope Mary learns that saying "I need help with this" is honest. Honesty and vulnerability are what keeps all of us from having to carry a hard feeling alone.

That's the whole practice, for kids and grown-ups alike. Some days the hardest part of this work isn't managing a child's big feelings. It's recognizing my own reflection in them.