The picture accompanying a news article grabbed my attention from my task at hand. A woman in another country was lying flat on her stomach, her elbows digging into the red soil. The photo was not in color; it didn’t need to be. The context was such that even in black and white, the color was vivid. The soil was dusty, hard-packed and red.
An infant was strapped onto the woman’s back. She was pulling, scratching and clawing toward a barbed wire fence. I surmised she was hoping escape, undetected and was hoping to find a hole or weak spot in that fence.
This was how this mother was spending her day.
Her plight haunts me years later. I had been sitting at my desk in a climate-controlled office, doing work I enjoyed among colleagues I also enjoyed and respected. The most “life-saving” efforts I was undertaking for my child was helping with college expenses.
My gripes and petty grievances about life pale and fizzle into embarrassment whenever I think of this woman who was reduced to crawling on her stomach in order to provide her child with perhaps not even a better life, but life itself.
My husband and I laugh about the time our son commented that he grew up in “an intellectual household.” Well, we do value education. Ours is a house filled with books, and money for books has never been an issue. We took our young son to live theatre. He acted in school and community theatres. He won awards for his writing and, at 15, was paid for his music reviews in an alternative newspaper.
While in junior high school, he had a movie review published in a college newspaper. He was enrolled in arts-related after school and summer activities. He sang in church choirs and played instruments in school bands. He graduated from a music college.
We fostered those things in our home. I worked to provide the financial resources (as did my husband). But it was work in a career field I chose and in which I found fulfillment.
I never had to crawl on my stomach to get my child to safety, much less to provide him with anything else in life.
That photo embedded itself into my being, making me want to be a better person, to appreciate my life and to focus on its beauty. They compel me beyond my self.
A brave, determined woman, she goes with me as I marvel at the beauty surrounding my walk through life.
What happened to this mother and her child? I hope they made it to wherever they were going. And I hope she and her son found a safe life of beauty and wholeness.
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