Find a heart that will love you at your worst, and arms that will hold you at your weakest.
Anonymous

All the way into town, Griffin cried. “I don’t want to go, Grandma. I really don’t want to go.” We were making the 9-mile journey into town to meet his mother who would take him to the dentist. His upper lip was swollen, and through the rearview mirror, I cringed at his duck-like profile. Though he had not complained, the fact that he’d eaten only two bites of pancake and his forehead felt warm to the touch gave him away. Something was wrong.

“But I don’t want to go. I really, really, really don’t want to go,” he insisted. Over and over again, like a mantra, he pleaded. As we pulled into the parking lot where we would meet his mom, he crawled from the backseat over the console into my lap. I wrapped my arms around him and let him cry. I had exhausted any words of comfort. There was nothing more I could say. Words were cheap; arms were better.

We rely on words for comfort, particularly with boys. Big boys don’t cry. Big boys are brave. Big boys muscle through. Personally, I like words and have relied heavily on them to carry me through most situations. I suppose I have believed that if I just kept talking, if I could find the right words, I could fix things, heal hurts, and solve problems. Yet the older I get, the more I have become painfully aware that, too often, words fall short.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood writes:

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings . . . but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.

I, too, want a real body to put my arms around. Sitting there in my car with my arms wrapped as tightly as I dared around Griffin, I was embodied, weighted with purpose, tethered to someone and something so much greater than myself. Arms are better–for those being held and for those doing the holding. Arms provide tangible means of comforting and of being comforted. Words may be good, but arms are so much better.

In his novel, Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin writes:

She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.

There have been so many times when I have held a friend or family member’s baby and felt the poignant absence of my own babies whom I held long after they had fallen asleep. In the middle of the night when the moon shone through the window, a sleeping baby in my arms, peace washed over and through me. When we fit someone into our arms, it’s often this way. We relish the gush of love and peace, while we simultaneously feel an emptiness born from absence. Still, who would trade those exquisite moments when we meld with another, when our arms pull another into the sanctuary of love.

As a young college instructor, I once took a coed to my home over the lunch hour. In her essay, she had confessed that she had been sexually abused by her father and her brothers for much of her adolescence. Anguished, I reread her words, honest, clear words that reeked with fear and pain. How could I bring her into the cubicle of the office I shared with four others? How could we talk about her experiences in such a public place where only a bulletin board provided us with some sense of privacy? Naively, but with the best intentions, I offered to make lunch for her in my home. My children would be at school, and my husband was at work. We would be alone and free to talk–and to cry. There, I would be free to put my arms around her as she wept.

When I returned to school, a colleague asked where I had gone during lunch. Without revealing much, I admitted that I had taken a student to my home to discuss some private issues she had painfully revealed in her latest essay. You took her to your house? And you were alone with her? Taken aback, I could only affirm that I had done just that. As a seasoned educator who was legally savvy, she warned: You don’t want to be alone with students. You don’t know what they might accuse you of later, and you have to protect yourself at all times.

I understand that some educators, coaches, employers, and others in power abuse the healing nature of appropriate touch. Their arms are not safe refuges; their intent is not to comfort. Regrettably, because of their abuse, it is now too risky to put your hand on another’s shoulder or your arm around them. Arms may be the right remedy–perhaps the only remedy–but they must remain passively at our sides while we offer what words of comfort and assurance we can muster. The world we now live in is not always arms-friendly.

Imagine all the wondrous things your arms might embrace if they weren’t wrapped so tightly around your struggles, writes author Sheila M. Burke. Sadly, I confess to having lived too much of my life with my arms wrapped tightly around my own struggles. Even my body language often gives me away. My arms encircle my frame, as if to hold myself together, as if to keep my struggles from showing their ugly faces. There are certainly so many wondrous things that I might have embraced. But I didn’t. My arms were too full of myself to take in anything or anyone else. There were other willing arms to take in all my pain, doubt, and fear. I turned inward, though, sadly proud of my willingness to tough it out on my own. When I might have stepped into God’s loving arms, I rationalized that such comfort was for others but not for me. If I had not had my arms wrapped so tightly around my own pain, I might have walked blessedly into the arms of mercy.

In her book of poetry, Turquoise Silence, Indian poet and freelance writer, Sanober Khan writes of the refuge that is found in a mother’s arms:

i want to
stay curled and cosied
and chocolated….forever
in my mother’s arms.

Curled and cosied and chocolated in your mother’s arms? Yes, please! In foxholes, at work and at rest, in board rooms and bedrooms, there is probably not one of us who has longed to curl into our mother’s arms. If only for a moment, we dream of the comfort that only these arms can bring us. If just for a second, we project our wearied souls into arms that offer–as Robert Frost once described poetry–a momentary stay against confusion.

As I held my grandson in the car that day, I realized that I was but a substitute for his mother who would soon scoop him into her arms and who would, without saying a word, bring solace to his weary six-year old soul. Though the dentist would later pull his three front teeth and Griffin would arch in fear against any attempts to administer the “happy gas,” even in the midst of such trauma, he understood that his mom was there with open arms that would take him home.

There is sanctuary, indeed, in arms that will hold you at your weakest. As I find myself increasingly at a loss for words, I plan to use my arms more–to love, to comfort, to offer a momentary stay against confusion. And I know one boy who fits into them perfectly, and always will.