Our Mother’s Day wish

When my 18-year-old son left home to go to university my husband and I were heartbroken. We were, and are still, so worried about him. He might be 18 but he’s still our baby. And still we worry.

Is he eating properly? Is he safe? Has he got friends? We know exactly where he is and we know that he has the money to feed and clothe himself. We know that he is as safe as any 18-year-old could be. We know he is 18 – a man.

Yet still I worry.

He has not left our home with the family savings to get on an overfilled dinghy with a dodgy life jacket to cross a dangerous sea. He has not had to walk for hundreds of miles and climb onto a moving lorry and hide above the wheels or sleep in a refrigerated lorry. He will not, on completing his journey, be greeted as an outsider, a scrounger.

He has not had to sleep in a sleeping bag on a street where people look at you as if you are beneath them. He has not had to rely on the charity of others for a hot meal. He has not laid in the cold and wet wondering if he will ever see his family again. My son is a man. He has left home, but he is safe

Yet still I worry.

And if I worry, then what must the anxiety be like for the mothers of all the refugees who are today living in camps, or on the streets, or worse? How painful is the concern of mothers who have no idea where their children are – or whether they are still alive?

 I cannot bear to try to imagine this despair.

Today, on Mothers’ Day think of all those mothers and all those children, from the cute six-year-old girls to the grown men, who when they worry, have no-one to comfort them. Who deserve to feel safe, to feel valued, to be fed and warm, and to be cared for. People, where is the compassion?

– Nicola, mother, volunteer