If you’re a parent, you remember them — when a child is truly hurt, or scared, or raw in any way, the tears that spill over their wide open eyes are huge and fat, almost round. Every one that follows that first one is the same, until it’s like a waterfall that rolls down, bucket by tiny bucket. Our hearts break with each one. All we want to do is make it better.
As adults, we tend to leak tears. I think it goes to the control we try to have over our emotions. A little water dribbles, flat, halfway down the cheek, maybe stuck under the lower lashes. We tend to squint, or dab them, or wipe them away as we leash whatever started them, so the effect is rarely the baby tears kind.
I have learned with some surprise, though, that there are mom moments that net those huge, fat, no-control tears that spill down and drop like little water bombs onto clothes, books, desks, keyboards…
Those come when danger faces the now-adults whose tears we dried when the little boy or little girl sobbing wound down to hitches and long, tight hugs. When we remember how innocent and helpless they were. How much they relied on us to protect them, comfort them, help them, make things right again when they were in pain.
We do all those things to prepare them for “The World Out There,” knowing they will go into it bit by bit, school grade by school grade, year by year, one small independence at an incremental time. We watch this go by, we’re there for it as much as we can be. Sometimes daily until they’re ready — although we rarely are — sometimes as much as possible if divorce or other separations intervene.
Then suddenly, they leap.
College, job, partner, military. Whatever the reason, off they go, taking a piece of our hearts with them.
Military and law enforcement moms face a different kind of letting go. Watching our kids put on uniforms, pick up weapons, train for protecting themselves and their fellow members, while we know they are also trained to kill other human beings if it’s deemed necessary to preserve their own lives and/or the lives of others.
The surreal superimposition of that baby in our arms with the one geared up with tight, huge muscles under skin we used to lotion and kiss is almost impossible to reconcile.
I’m an Army mom. I’m in groups with other Army moms. I’m also a Navy mom, but there is something about also being a Navy veteran and former Navy wife that makes that somehow more natural, less terrifying. I know from personal experience and long association exactly what is expected of that son.
The other one, the youngest of my three kids, is the one who laughs with his barracks roommates about how, “well, if [this happens or that happens], we’ll be door-kickers, bro. We’ll be the ones kicking doors in.”
And we — the Army moms — know what that means. Military moms are also Blue Star Mothers, either officially by joining, or by merely having kids on active duty or are military veterans.
There is a ceremony for Blue Star Mothers who become Gold Star Mothers when a child dies on active duty. We all grieve with those moms, and we know how she remembers she used to be one of the ones who was as silently grateful as we are that it wasn’t ours who elevated us to that status. We can’t imagine how she feels, but we know the fears we wrestle every day because it could be any one of ours at any moment. We know. We all know.
Those times — the ones when those fears fight through the tamping down and deliberate distractions to rise to the surface — are the ones marked by those same baby tears we wiped away for our little ones so many times. Only now we’re the ones spilling them. We don’t tell our babies. We never tell them. We only want to show our strength to them — until we’re putting them on a plane or they’re coming home. But they know.
The pride is almost as crushing as the fear. Both are profound.
And sometimes, God bless those babies who cried in our arms, now with big, strong arms and gritty hands, wipe ours away.
Note: This piece was originally written with the title “Baby Tears” on 5 March 2017. My situation has changed some, and there’s some journalistic something-or-other that makes me want to clarify for accuracy’s sake, if nothing else.
When I wrote this, I was in touch with my youngest son, who joined the Army, which terrified the bejesus out of me. I looked for Army mom support — I had a friend who I already knew had a son in the Army, and she pointed me to several groups, including Blue Star Mothers, which I immediately joined, because I knew they’d get it. They did.
I’m not in touch with that son now. Long story, not the point, and I’m in here updating all my posts because I’m coming back to this blog after a long absence. I almost deleted this, but decided not to, for two reasons. One is that I like it — it’s honest. The other is because I still belong to Blue Star Mothers, even though I’m not in touch with my Army son, because once you join a group like that — wait a minute — not a group “like” that — THAT group — because when you get the notification that a blue star has turned to gold, meaning that a mother’s child has died on active duty, you feel a sympathy unlike any other. And you see pictures and hear stories of how these women are comforted, at times by other military sons and husbands — the “strong arms and gritty hands.”
I’m reposting this for them.
(The image at the top is me with my youngest, the one in the Army now, when he was four.)
Sea Glass & Quill 