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Welcome to familywisdom.com, a website dedicated to informing and inspiring couples and families. Each week you will find a new article, story or essay about parenting, marriage or life. Suggestions for articles and questions to Ellen Terich are welcome. You can contact her at e.terich1@verizon.net |
INVISIBLE STRING 2004-05-12 I've been struggling for days to think of an inspirational or funny essay to write, but my mind is filled with the television images of war and death and humiliation of prisoners half a world away and it's hard to think of much else. As a mother, I let my mind wander to thoughts of other mothers, those American mothers who are worried about their children fighting in Iraq, and those Iraqi mothers who wonder if any of their sons are lost in an American prison camp. It is such a hard thing to be a mother. As a mother, you invest your whole body and then all your energy, time and attention into the careful nurturing of a son or daughter and then in an instant, that child can be gone, taking with him or her a part of your soul. I once knew a woman who had had to leave her six year old son for two weeks to go back east to care for a dying relative. The son was very attached to his mother and cried every night the week before she left because he didn't want her to go. She came up with a beautiful way to tell him that she really wasn't leaving him completely and to assure him that she would be back. She said that the hearts of mothers and the hearts of their children are attached to each other with an invisible string that can stretch very far, but never breaks. When the two weeks were up, she said, she would follow the string back to him. This imagery consoled him and after she left, every time she called home she reminded him of the string. It got him through the two weeks and made him stronger. I thought of that story a lot when my 22 year old son drove alone from California to Delaware to accept a job opportunity. He had already lived away from home for four years at college in Los Angeles, but when I knew he was heading off to a destination 3000 miles away, I felt a profound anguish. Apparently he did too, as he called home every night of the trip and, in his loneliness and aloneness, more than once considered turning down the job and coming home. He didn't, partly because of his own determination, and partly because, through silent tears and fighting my own impulse to shout "come back," I encouraged him each night to keep going. He's still living a considerable distance away, although in Seattle now, and married. His brother lives there too, so they are able to visit each other or, as they say, "hang out." I miss them both more than they will ever know, but I still have that invisible string that I can follow back to them whenever I go up to visit. My friend didn't tell her son, because he was too young to understand and because there was no point in frightening him, that even though the invisible string remains, it sometimes doesn't bring the mother and child back together. I hope all of the American and Iraqi mothers can hold onto the string that connects them to their sons and daughters who are far away or missing. And I pray that no more of them will have to learn that the other end of the string, the one that is connected to their child, will forever be out of their reach. |