“Cor ad cor loquitur”
I sometimes wonder if my children will know how to have conversations when they get older. With their mouths, I mean.
The other day I was driving to a baseball tournament with my 17 year old son.
“Are you sure you want to go to the tournament?” my husband asked me as I was brushing my teeth, preparing to head to San Jose for the day.
“No.” I said decidedly. “I’m sure I do NOT want to go to the tournament. I’m not particularly excited about spending the whole day in the blazing hot sun, sitting on hard metal bleachers watching bad baseball. I’d rather stay here and do 15 loads of laundry, cut back the blackberry bushes and scrub stains out of the carpet on my hands and knees.”
I was not kidding.
But being the mother that I am, I thought it might be a good opportunity to “talk” to my oldest. Have an old fashioned conversation of sorts. You may remember them. I say something and then he says something and then I say something and then he says something and on and on. Like we used to do in the good old days.
“I find it hard to believe that when you were a kid you didn’t have cell phones and iPods and computers,” he said, after a while. “It seems so, well, unnatural. I mean, I can’t imagine what it must have been like. Like, how did you ever communicate?”
How, exactly, did we?
My son talks with his thumbs. “Did you call LT,” I asked him the other day. My son’s best friend lives in the next town over and they were trying to firm up plans for the weekend.
“I texted him,” he said quickly. “I’m waiting for him to respond.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to call him?” I said naively.
“Mom, no one calls anyone anymore,” he replied, as though the entire notion seemed utterly ridiculous. I stared back at him in disbelief. Unfortunately, we’ve gone down this road once or twice before. “Why is it such a big deal to you?” This afternoon, a young woman from Columbia stood in front of the class. “I wrote my paper on the psychological impact of immigration,” she started softly as she took a deep breath, her voice shaking. “You have to excuse me, I’m very nervous and my English is not very good,” and she began to tell her story.
“When I was a 12 year old girl, as we were driving in the car, my mother was shot,” she continued as the tears began to well up in her eyes. “My father decided that it was not safe for us to stay in Columbia." Hoping to find safety for his family, he took his son and came to America. "He struggled to find work. What he earned, he sent back to Columbia to my mother and I. It was very hard. We missed him very much. He sought political asylum, wanting to bring my mother and I to live with him in this country. It would be 3 years before we would see him again.”
Every semester I assign a paper to my psychology students. The assignment is to pick an experience that has had a psychological impact on them and write about it, and every semester I am surprised by what I get back. What they share with me.
The stories of their lives. Little snapshots of life’s photo album and each time I flip through the pages, I feel humbled.
And until this semester, when I decided to have them present their papers to their classmates, I was the only one who got to see the pictures.
As this beautiful young woman from Columbia spoke of her experiences in this country, of the pain of not seeing her father and brother for 3 years, of the agony of never being able to return to her native country, of the sadness of being separated from her older siblings who, because of their age, were unable to seek political asylum with the others, I looked around the room. Her classmates were mesmerized.
“I do not belong anywhere,” she said, sadly. “I cannot go back to Columbia and although this country is now my home, I do not really belong here. It is,” she said, as her voice broke with emotion, “Very difficult,” and gathering her papers, she quietly made her way back to her seat.
You could have heard a pin drop.
Language. The sound of her voice as it cracks with emotion. The tears streaming down her face as she relates the sound of the gunfire as it broke the sounds of an otherwise nondescript family outing. The feelings that rose from a place deep inside me as I listened, moved by this small window into the life of this young woman who has sat in the same chair in the back of the room each day for the past 6 weeks.
That’s what this generation is missing. That’s what the texting, emailing, facebooking, AIM’ing generation is being cheated of. Connection. Real connection. Heart to heart connection.
On the wall of the convocation center of my son’s school are painted the words “Cor ad cor loquitur.” Translated, it means, heart speaking to heart. My son’s words echoed in my head as I made the drive home. “Why is it such a big deal?”
It just is.