Yesterday for New Year's Day we went to visit some friends who have boys ages 2 and 7, which made me strangely sad for the future days when my little baby starts growing up and running around. With that melancholy in mind, I later coaxed the baby into sleeping on my chest as I pursued the great New Year's Day Channel Surf that everyone who partied too hard New Year's Eve enjoys.

During the Great Surf, everything is fair game. Which is how I ended up on a couple of minutes of Beaches, which is one of those girly movies that is designed specifically to make women cry. What I didn't remember about it was that in the scenes where (spoiler alert) the lady-who-tragically-dies is pregnant, Bette Midler sings "Baby Mine," which is like an Easter egg of sadness, as "Baby Mine" is a sad song from the saddest movie scene in history. Do you know "Baby Mine"? Here it is. To set it up, little baby elephant Dumbo was roughed up by some bullies, and his mother stepped in to protect him, but she was rewarded by being locked up as a "Mad Elephant," so now little baby Dumbo is without his mommy, but he's able to visit her in her elephant jail, where she rocks him to this song:

I'm not kidding that I am crying right now as I type this even though I already cried earlier today looking up this song. This song used to make me cry before I was old enough, I think, to even drive, let alone be a mother, but now, forget it. I also looked up the lyrics ("Rest your head close to my heart/Never to part, baby of mine" -- that's JUST LIKE ME AND MY BABY) and realized that the lyrics are not just about a mother loving her child but also about a mother protecting her baby from bullies.

How is it legal that Disney could ever share something so sad with the whole world? A baby who is kept away from his mom because she protected him? Even the mouse in the movie is crying.

My husband just came by the kitchen to laugh at me as I cried some more, and he called this song/scene "mom kryptonite," but you don't have to be a mom to find this scene sad (as evidenced by my husband's convenient refusal to watch it.) I think it's just "cry crack," something cruelly guaranteed to make watchers cry or to make anybody who really wants to cry, cry.