Sending a Son off to War: a Mother's Anguish

For 23 years as a mother, I have assumed that my job description included sweeping whatever detritus lay in my daughter's path threatening to stub her toes or trip her up. Some might argue that at 23 she is no longer a child and that attempts to protect her are no longer my responsibility. My role has become, what? Emeritus?

But I have noticed that parents talk about such boundaries with a lot less clarity and conviction than other people.

This January, my daughter ended up in the hospital for reasons that finally proved not to be life-threatening, but for the first two weeks of her stay I was not at all sure that was going to be the case. I slept in the bed with her or on blankets on the floor of her room because touch was really my only comfort. That fragile membrane of false security was all there was between me and the terrible half-finished sentences, the what ifs that menaced.

Those two weeks were an eternity. I still have flashbacks to moments of horror, moments when she had to endure some unspeakably painful procedure, or when the doctors suddenly and obviously went into emergency mode and snatched her away to be seen to by others who knew more, could offer more, than I, only her mother.

I could see the Hudson from her window. I'm a New Yorker. At different times, in different lights, the Hudson is part of the landscape of home, safe, comforting, enduring. But for those bleak days, I couldn't see the river for the inexorable flow of its waters. I wanted only to stop the clocks, to keep her safe for a few more moments. And then a few more.

Frances Richey's book of poems, The Warrior (Viking, 2008), was written before, during and after her only son's deployments to Iraq, in 2004 and then again in 2005. She writes about archetypically terrific moments:

The vertigo started in March

when he told me

he would be deployed.

I sat down on the sidewalk

at the corner of Forty-Third

and Broadway, waited

for the spinning to stop.

And about archetypical fears. Richey, who teaches and practices yoga, writes:

It was easy to think of warrior

As a yoga posture, until my son

Became a Green Beret. Green:

Color of the fourth chakra,

Anahata; it means unstruck-

The heart center;

The color of his fatigues.

When Arjuna rode into battle,

the disguised Krishna by his side,

he looked out from his chariot

over the field of familiar faces,

cried out, I cannot do this!

Krishna said, You must fight!

Where is the solace in my warrior

if my son is lost?

If he returns another man?

That is perhaps the most terrible question for a parent -- how will I survive the wait and the not-knowing, and will I survive at all if my worst fears are realized?

Distance is a central issue in these poems. Before the war, Richey measured distance between herself and her son by positions taken in debate. She was liberal; he, conservative. She was against this war; he was a soldier, "honorable and disciplined, who wanted to serve his country," she recently explained to me. But then his deployment to Iraq became imminent. It became clear that distance would soon be measured in real miles and real time. "When his life was on the line, I suddenly realized that politics was not important to me. My son was important to me."

So she helps him pack, trying to familiarize herself with the specific items he must carry, his helmet, his gun, grenade pouches, body armor, detailing a process by which she hopes to transform those things formerly associated with injury and loss into the stuff of protection and agency. To his helmet:

(H)ow many have died

because you weren't enough?

Because you couldn't be everywhere?

I wanted to put you on,

but you weren't mine, your only

country that remnant of the fontanel I felt once

while he slept

before the bones closed over it.

Or his gun:

It wasn't about blood