I found an article when I was looking through an old edition of a magazine, I just happened to stumble on the article, nestled between pages of jokes, which I read almost religiously. I read this article only because it was short and the illustration was of a man crying. In just one and a half page I had a new insight into my life and like the man, I too started crying.
Whenever my mother calls, I see it as my duty to talk to her. Often, she calls while I am talking to my husband, or watching TV or doing my homework and my reaction to hearing her voice on the phone is, in that very first second, one of annoyance. Then I smother it but she knows me so well that even in my voice, I know she detects that reluctance to talk, that reluctance to face the interruption in my daily routine.
I throw crumbs her way, again, things done out of duty and not love. I want to make her an Eid card, not because I particularly want to, but because I am making one for my husband and to not send one to my mother and father would seem too rude and cold hearted. In one little card, on which I will spend no money and just a few hours of my time, I hope to express a smidgen of love that I feel for them and I see that card from me as the extent of my duty to them.
But reading this article today made me feel ashamed. It’s about this young man who at 17 joins the Marine Corps. A few months later, he is so busy having fun that he hasn’t written her a letter, and she, worried and scared for his safety, contacts Red Cross who get in touch with his Lieutenant. The superior orders him to write a letter and to write one every week. The young man says I have nothing to say to her but writes them nonetheless. Nearly four decades later, packing her stuff when he is about to move her to a convalescent home, he finds each and every one of his letters tied with a ribbon in her drawer. The emotion he must have felt, only he knows but now I understand why he was crying because at that point, I had tears running down my face as well. I can imagine the woman seeing those letters as one of her most precious possessions, a tangible reminder of a son she had raised, fed, bathed, taught, felt proud over his smallest accomplishment, bragged about. Maybe she touched them or read them tenderly, like I run my hands over my husband’s picture or read his letters, kept safely in a box in my drawer.
They say that in every relationship there is one person that loves more. But how ironic that when confronted with this statement in our relationships with friends or spouses, we see it as a sign of selfishness. But when we consider this statement in the context of a parent and child relationship, we see it as a natural law of the universe, something that when we encounter ourselves, we receive a reply of “get over it”. Get over it, someone might say, we grow up and move away, and that’s how it works.
- Sarah
