When You Hear Crickets From Your Kids

I filled out all the necessary paperwork, hauled my son to the doctor’s office for rabies and yellow fever vaccines, bought semi-permanent insect repellant for his clothes and then treated them, went to his commissioning ceremony with the very highest expectations, and then, at the appointed time, delivered him to the airport for his mission trip to Kenya.


And then over the next five days I received a single text. One. With ten words. Should I have been concerned? According to my husband, a Marine and a man of few words, no. In fact, he told me that unless we heard from the State Department we should believe that all was well. What?! Who thinks like that? This is 2017. We have Wifi and text messages. I know for a fact that phones work in Africa. But crickets for me because I am the mother of a grown son.


I complained bitterly on Facebook, and my friends who have sons shared my pain. One of them told me that she would expect just a single word—here—if her son were in a similar position and that she’d be grateful for it. Another friend said her sons operate under this maxim: no news is good news.


I wondered if this was a unique issue with boys but my sister set me straight. I called her, lamenting my son’s lack of communication and she told me it had happened to her with her eldest daughter.


In 1995, when her eldest was eight she went camping for two weeks. My dutiful sister made sure she had a bundle of self-addressed stamped envelopes so that her daughter could write home during her first extended overnight adventure. Then my sister wrote her nearly every day and sent multiple care packages. And waited. No mail. How was that even possible? On the last day of camp my sister, now overly excited and practically jumping out of her skin, arrived at the camp and ran to her daughter, hugging her tightly.


“Why didn’t you write?” she asked. “Didn’t you see the envelopes I put in your luggage? Didn’t you miss me?”


And her daughter, who was already squaring her shoulders to the world, replied, “Well, mom. I didn’t miss you as much as I thought I would.”


There you have it. You madly do all the work to prepare your kids for this world, send them out, and then wait for some morsel of communication, some sort of proof of life. Maybe you’re luckier than we were. Maybe your kids text you every day in college or while they’re on trips. But it’s not happening in my corner of the world. And maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe we’re raising kids who are ready for the world, kids who fiercely look forward. I’m going to try to believe that, but it would still be great if they could still return a text message.



Elisabeth Richardson loves yoga, dogs, travel, and reading; she’s a huge fan of Ann Patchett, John Irving, and Anne Lamott.