To the mother whose son stopped calling

It’s Sunday evening, and the phone is face up on the kitchen counter. You turned the ringer all the way up this morning, just in case. You’ve checked it while the coffee brewed, while you folded towels, while the news was on. Nothing from him. There was a time he called you from the school office because he forgot his lunch. Now you hear about his new job from a cousin’s post on Facebook.

So you go over it. The last call, and what you said. The Christmas that got tense. You look for the moment it turned, the way you’d look for a lost earring, sure that if you could just find it, you could put it back.

In 1971 two researchers, Vern Bengtson and Joseph Kuypers, gave a name to something family studies keep finding: parents describe the bond with their grown children as closer than the children do. They called it the “developmental stake.” You put a whole life into him. He is busy putting his life into his own work, his own partner, maybe his own small children. The same bond weighs more in your hands than in his. It isn’t that you love too much and he loves too little. You’re holding it from different ends.

That doesn’t make the quiet hurt less. But it may mean his silence is not the verdict on you that it feels like at nine o’clock on a Sunday night. A grown son who doesn’t call may not be saying “you failed me.” He may not be saying anything at all. He’s busy carrying his own life, and the Sunday call to you has slipped off his list.

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You can miss him without building a case against yourself. If you want, send one short message that asks for nothing back: “Thought of you today. Love you, Mom.” Not a test he has to pass, not a question he has to answer. Then turn the phone face down and let the evening be yours again.

What you gave him didn’t stop counting when the calls slowed down. It’s in how he talks to the people he loves, how he gets through a hard day, the small things he does without knowing where he learned them. A good part of you is out there right now, living on in a grown man who hasn’t called his mother lately.

The phone may stay quiet tonight. That tells you something about his week. It doesn’t tell you what kind of mother you were.

— Be A Good Mom

Source: Bengtson, V. L. & Kuypers, J. A. (1971). “Generational difference and the developmental stake.” Aging and Human Development, 2(4), 249–260.