Mother's Tears

by Rick Hartwell


​I feel the hurt of my 3 a.m. son, with a cracked voice and tears scoring his cheeks.
 
“No. There’s nothing wrong,” in response to her as I awake, and which quickly turns to dust in his mouth and bitterness towards his questioner. He knows, she knows, I know, that his mother only wants to succor him, to hold him close against her breasts again and shield him from the harm and hurt and hunger of the world.
 
His appetites, like the appetites of all young men turning old, are un-sated and seemingly un-satiable. How can he possibly answer his mother? How can you describe or satisfy a craving when you don’t even know what it is you want, desire, or need. It is ridiculous to ask him “What’s the matter?” as if a single declarative could answer that question.
 
“Nothing,” he responds. Everything? No thing? All things? Who’s to say? She might as well ask the cats why they sharpen their paws on the furniture; they’ve all been de-clawed.
 
However, his mother continues to be the catch basin for his sorrows. She is awake at all hours, alerted to his tears and frustrations. She has filled this role for years, but has never overflowed, never been sated by his pains, whether from the bumps and bruises of youth or from the trials and tribulations of adolescence. Now there’s an interesting conundrum: when does adolescence end? Eighteen? Twenty-five? Forty? Ever? As for me, I’m still waiting. I still have the 3 a.m. tears, but the reasons are skewed to the left or right and somehow don’t seem quite so immediate as those of my youngest son.
 
He can’t explain his tears, but that makes them no less real. Images from a faded nightmare still repel us from sleep no less urgently because of their furred and fuzzy edges. A blunt knife is often quicker to slip and stab than one honed to sharpness, whetted, and known to the entire household. Justin’s needs and desires are unfocused, diluted, like the blood oozing from a cut and held under the faucet seems to spread quicker and faster with an urgency that belies how superficial the wound might be. His bleeding heart and soul are sliced just deep enough for pain and mess, but not so deeply as to require the stitches of his mother’s love; not this time; not yet. Those needs will probably come with his own family, and loss, or indirection of his life, when he needs and seeks the help no one can give him because he is no longer the child from whom the pain may be taken, transferred to the mother, empathically distributed to others; borne by the older generation, knowledgeable that survival will occur. No. His childhood is not over, but is ending; and the cistern of his sorrows is emptied into his mother, in the shadows, in the dark, at 3 a.m.
 
And then he is gone once more as I hear the front door close behind him.