THE INNER WORKINGS...

Watching a mother cry for her children is all-at-once beautiful and horrifying. 

There's an intimate beauty to the scene: the bigness of her heart, her visceral and instinctive self-sacrifice, the deluge of her affection that swallows-up any other measly attempt at an emotion in the room. And then there's the pain: the gut-wrenching pain, the way her soul literally seems to be tearing into pieces, the overwhelming suction that seems to steal the air out of every nook and cranny within reach.

I witnessed this terrible and sacred scene on four different occasions last week in my sessions with four different undocumented immigrant mothers. As a counselor, I have the privilege to sit in the hard with people all the time. There's tragedy. There's betrayal. There's loss. But this - these mothers' tears - this feels different. 

The silence wasn't a therapist's game: she literally couldn't speak. The tears were coming too hard and too fast and the breaths were too short to sustain speech. She told me how afraid she was to leave the house. To go to work. To come to her appointments. Because they might come for her. She might get nervous and forget to use her blinker and they might pull her over. And then she would, without warning and without goodbyes, be put in a detention center and sent back to a country that she left decades ago. But it's not the possible detention that causes the tears. It' not even the potential return to a country rife with the poverty and violence she has worked hard to escape. No, these tears weren't for her. They were for her sons. They were tears belying the terrifying possibility that she would go out for a gallon of milk or another bag of frijoles and never return. And there her sons would remain, back at home, wondering where she had gone. Then who would make them dinner? Who would tuck them in that night? Who would take them to school the following day? Who would do their laundry and help them with their homework and go to their parent-teacher conferences and scold them for not calling their grandma and celebrate their birthdays and hug them and tell them everything would be all right? 

The tears continued when she described a recent walk that she took with her youngest son. She said she had to be coaxed to go on the walk, since any time she leaves the house, she gets apprehensive. But she knew that she couldn't keep a young teenager cooped up for the entire weekend, and so she acquiesced. As they exited their apartment complex and rounded the corner, her son noticed a yard sign in a neighbor's lawn. It said (in Spanish) that immigrants were welcome in the neighborhood. "Look, mom!" her son exclaimed. "These people like us! They like hispanics!" She said her son was thrilled and took a picture of the sign to share later with his aunts and uncles. 

And that's when I saw her mother's soul writhe. Her son's excitement was lined with a tragic irony. "He's just a child," she said, once she was able to speak again. "He was so happy that someone liked him. But why can't they like him for just being him? It's not his fault." The painful tears begged for a world where her son wouldn't have to look to a yard sign to measure his acceptance in the community. They begged for a world where her son would have access not only to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness but also to the security that when his mom leaves for the store, she will be coming back. They begged for a world where she could parent her son from the next room over rather than the next country over. They begged for the luxury of being a mother to three wonderful teenage boys.

It probably has to do with the way I was trained as a counselor: my emotion shouldn't burden the client's emotion. And so, even though I hear terribly tragic stories every day, over the course of my career and the hundreds of counseling sessions that I've sat in with clients, I've only teared-up three or four times. But as I sat across from this mother last week, watching the fiercest of loves grapple with the most tragic of possibilities, I couldn't contain myself. 

I saw true beauty. And true horror. All wrapped up in a mother's heart.

(Just in case you are wondering, this woman gave me permission to tell her story.  I hope to have done her telling of it justice.)