No One Should Go Through This: Empathy and Action

Remember with me:

You were in a store or a mall or the zoo or another large place and you realized you could not locate your parents. You looked where they were last and they are not there. As you realize you are lost, the panic wells up inside you. Maybe you cry. Maybe you crumple to the ground. There are no cell phones. You don’t know anyone. You feel completely helpless.

You turn for two seconds to pay for the clothes or to check your watch or make sure you didn’t leave a bag at the table and your child has disappeared. You search the area and you cannot see your child anywhere. Perhaps you are hanging on to another child or a stroller or turn to your partner. Your heart is racing. Where is my child?

You are trying to go to sleep. You have been properly tucked in and all the bedtime rituals have been completed. The light streams out from under your door and you can hear the television and your parent on the phone. You think, “what is my mommy or daddy wasn’t there when I woke up? What if they left? What if they didn’t come back? What if they died?” Before you complete the chain of thoughts, you are crying into your pillow. You tell yourself that nothing has happened. That everyone is at home and watching TV, but somehow merely imagined disaster has upset you so much that sleep is now impossible.

You are awakened by sobs or maybe yelling. You rush to the source of the sound and find your child thrashing in bed, wrestling a nightmare. You gently put your arms around them and turn on a night-light. The child is disoriented, still feeling the residual emotion and not sure what is going on. “It’s alright,” you tell your child, “Everything is fine. You’re fine. I’m here.”

You don’t want to go to the funeral, but you must. You don’t want to consider the possibility that someone so young could die. While you have strong feelings for the parents, you sit in a special place of denial. This sort of thing can’t happen, doesn’t happen, especially to people like us. As you wait to greet the parents, you grip your resolve and try to remember what to say. You fight the tears. They are the grieving parents, not you. Yet you cannot help but see yourself in them, and your child in their loss.

The phone rings. It is late at night or early in the morning. The voice of your child startles you to alertness, “I’ve been in an accident.” Your mind races with questions. Your child has few answers beyond where they are and what is going on. They are at the police station or the hospital or on the side of a road. You are putting on your clothes and grabbing your keys and wallet and rushing out of the house.

The image of a parent being separated from their child at the border is one I don’t want to think about. I can see it all too clearly. I can imagine the child who is lost, confused, and thrust into a strange and terrifying place without any signs of safety. I haven’t been there, but my experiences allow me to empathize and I resist that feeling because it is so gut-wrenching.

I cannot imagine causing this.  

While not all of us are parents, we were all children. Let us remember what this feels like. Regardless of politics, economics, or any other artificial distinction, let us be human. Let us treat each other humanely.

The events at the border are horrifying in a visceral and primal way. Let us do everything we can to reunite children and their parents. No one’s child should be a pawn in a political maneuver.

Here are a few articles that will help you take action:

Five Things You Can Do from Rolling Stone

List of organizations to which you can donate

An updated list of organizations working to end the separation

Seven Ways to Take Jewish Action (not only for Jewish people)

The Struggle of Long Distance Parenting

The camp called to say that my son was ill. He had spent a day or two in the infirmary and they thought he might have pneumonia. They were going to take him to the hospital for x-rays. The camp nurse through it was pneumonia. The camp doctor didn’t. The nurse was right. They treated him and, about a week later, I could not get to camp fast enough to pick him up. I won’t tell you how fast the four-hour drive took us.

When we pulled up to camp and my son was waiting, sitting on the fence, with all the rest of the kids, looking and behaving like himself, I was so relieved it was hard to remain composed. I had been so worried. My child was away from home and sick; I was powerless to help him, but he was okay.

While it did occur to me to swoop in, scoop him up, and spirit him home to the doctor, it took all of my self-control to stay home and wait for updates. I am glad I did. He didn’t need me. He was in good hands. My anxiety was not his anxiety.

Letting go is difficult. Letting your children take care of their own challenges, especially when they are far away, is even more challenging. The line between helping and smothering, between robbing a child of power and being a supportive parent is especially difficult to find – and more so during difficult times. And it is even more difficult when they are older.

Helping younger children be independent problem solvers is what parents are supposed to do. Solving the problem for the child, especially when the child is a teenager – or older – is what parents are supposed to avoid.

Facing tests is how children learn independence, problem-solving, and gain competence and confidence. I know, in my head, that I need to let the kids solve the problem and rushing in to rescue them robs them of agency. I have written about how my parenting prime directive is don’t do anything for the child that they can do for themselves.  

My challenge is that I desperately want to save them! Their pain is my pain. Sometimes, I may be in more pain. I can always rationalize that the stakes are high and that I am only assisting and not taking over. Even as I am thinking this, part of me knows it is not true. I have learned to recognize these tendencies and step back.

It was difficult to do this when my children were in younger and living at home. It is much more difficult when they are far away. Long distance parenting is far more difficult than hands-on parenting for me. When I am hundreds of miles away, I cannot step between my child and the discomfort or difficulty. My child must act. I must take a backseat role and assist, often by being no more than a sideline voice. And my child gets to choose what they want to do with my suggestions.

I have written about my elder child’s experience in Africa. So I was delighted when my younger child chose to go to Paris. That felt way more reasonable and safe, especially considering all that happened to his sister in Nairobi.

His journey to Paris was fraught with travel snafus. The program wanted him to arrive during his final week. His home campus is an hour away from the airport. The first flight was diverted, and he got stuck and had to find a hotel room. He missed the second flight and had to be rebooked and thus missed the beginning of his program. When he finally arrived in Paris, his luggage didn’t and he had an internship interview the next day; he only had the clothes he had worn for three days.

And there was nothing his father could do but track flights and wait for a call.

You know what? He worked it out. He had the interview and got the internship. He has the skills to take care of himself – and he knows how to call his father and ask for assistance when he needs it.

That wasn’t the problem or rather, his problem. The problem was my own sense of urgency and anxiety: my own need to make it okay for him and prevent him from feeling what I was feeling. Nope.

Parenting is about the child. Over-parenting is about the parent. The parent makes excuses that sound like they are protecting, saving, or otherwise helping the child. What they are really doing is making life better for themselves, alleviating their own feelings that they attribute to the child.

Growing up can be messy. The issues that I have encountered are almost laughably “first world” and simple. They didn’t feel that way to me at the time. They felt urgent and dangerous – to me.

We have heard over and over, parents need to let their children be independent. It’s true. The take away is that we, the parents, need to swallow our need to smother and save and let the kid struggle. We need to recognize that our discomfort is not their discomfort. We can be allies and assistants, but only when our children call us in – and sometimes not even then.

I was proud of how my son handled – and continues to handle – challenges in a foreign country. I am delighted by his resourcefulness and street smarts. I know he has practiced them because his father has almost no hair- and plenty of practice swallowing his desire to save!