I will never speak to this mother, yet I felt a tug that stretches across the thousand miles between us. I need not know her name, her address, her driving record or her economic status to quiver at such selflessness. She responded to a crisis with sacrificial love.

 

Parents pay dearly for their children, if you can calculate the cumulative costs of peanut butter, back packs, dance lessons and braces. Then if you try to quantify lost sleep, chauffeuring, and the emotional erosion from worry, parenting carries a heavy price. Yet they are propelled, if not dragged by a force that cannot be overestimated, at least if you are positioning yourself between a mother grizzly and her cubs.  

 

Adults are hard wired to protect their children, and to provide for them. Yet sometimes they are misdirected about what reaps the greatest foundation. We may fall for alluring messages about designer shoes, or the perfect vacation. Yet the research about the devastating effects of divorce on children cannot be dismissed. It rips through our culture like a twister. Protecting your children with a pink cell phone and box seats to the game, while exposing them to the whirlwind of divorce, is like trying to hold out a hurricane with cardboard and duct tape. 

 

Mothers sometimes feel as if their limbs are being ripped off, in the effort to safeguard their children. But for some, the price is worth it if their child walks away unharmed.

 

When the family comes apart and the pink canopy bed with Little Mermaid sheets flies into the black tunnel, every child wants nothing so much as the four warm arms of married parents.