THORN: A mother's fears, a son's resolve

Poems help a writer deal with her dread of child's Iraq tours

By Patti Thorn, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published April 25, 2008 at 3 p.m.

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Frances Richey's son Ben was the inspiration for her book of poems, The Warrior (A Mother's Story of a Son at War).

Just before Frances Richey's son Ben was deployed to Iraq, she found herself sitting on the sidewalk at the corner of 43rd and Broadway in Manhattan, felled by a sudden dizzy spell.

Although her vertigo was a real physical ailment, the symbolic implications were hard to miss: Her world was spinning out of control. Any armchair psychologist could call that one.

"I think it was some part of me expressing how hard it was to live with that fear that he might not come home," she tells me on the phone.

Ben, stationed at Fort Carson, has returned safely from two tours of duty, but Richey's voice still falters when speaking of those fears. And you have only to read Richey's remarkable new book of poems, The Warrior (A Mother's Story of a Son at War) (Viking, $21.95), to realize that, in a sense, the spinning never stopped.

With the rawest of emotion, they detail her disorientation watching Ben transform into a soldier from a sheltered child, one whose mother was careful to keep even toy guns out of her son's hands.

"I had the idea that my kid was never going to experience any violence," she tells me, realizing now that dream was unrealistic. Without a toy weapon, "He ate his toast into the shape of a gun."

Richey, 57, divorced Ben's father when Ben was a toddler. She climbed the corporate ladder while juggling mothering duties in the New Jersey suburbs.

As Ben grew up and left for West Point, later becoming a Green Beret, she sought what she calls a more "authentic" life. With Ben's needs taken care of, "It took awhile for me to realize that I could jump off that cliff, try to make a living at something I really loved."

She moved to New York, becoming a yoga teacher and a writer. In the meantime, her relationship with Ben had grown tense. Ben supported the war; she opposed it. They often fought over their political differences, a rift exacerbated as Ben went off to Iraq, returning distant and, due to the nature of his service, unable to elaborate on his experiences.

"I couldn't reach him," Richey recalls. "When they come back, their eyes just seem to look through you."

She began filling journals with her conflicted feelings. Those thoughts provided the raw material for the 28 pieces that make up The Warrior.

Richey's longing to connect with Ben is evident in the book. He is defiant in his emotional distance: "There are things I'll never be able to tell you."

She fears for his safety, imagining him on patrol, and mourns her loss as he moves into this foreign new world: "He has another life/where he stuffs a plug of tobacco/inside his cheek, straps a knife/to his thigh/ searches the homes of strangers."

And she recognizes that Ben could come home safe but still be a casualty: "Where is the solace in my warrior/if my son is lost?/If he returns another man?"

The writing process was therapeutic, Richey notes, though it's clear her emotions still live close to the surface.

As we speak, the author sounds relaxed and happy, yet her voice occasionally breaks.

"With these poems, it did help me to bear that I couldn't protect my son," she says. There's a long pause, and I realize Richey is trying not to break down. "Just give me a minute."

She collects herself and continues. "As I think of it, there were several things about the writing that helped. For me, there's the first part, just to write about something without editing ... and of course when Ben was deployed, that's pretty much all I could think about. When I was writing, I felt closer to Ben.

"Then comes the part when I pull out these pieces that feel like the music of what's going to become a poem. Then it becomes more about crafting, which pulled me out of the 'Oh my God, I can't bear this' ...

"It was really made of hope, too. When I was working on a poem, I was wondering if Ben will like that, what he'll think about this ... It was almost like magical thinking. If I kept writing, he would come home."

The gravity of Richey's predicament won't escape any parent. Interestingly, when I talk to Ben, 33, in a separate phone call, I notice a contrasting nonchalance about many of the things his mother writes about. For example, Ben didn't see himself putting on emotional armor as he prepared to go to Iraq - "not in the same way that my mom was aware. When you're doing something, you're just doing it. This was something I chose to do ...

"To an extent, yes, everyone is aware of themselves moving into that role, filling that role of warrior or whatever - I just call it soldier. At the same time, I'm doing something normal, something I'd trained to do. I want to say that it was not that big a deal."

Both agree that the poems brought them back together.

Ben recalls reading Letters, in which Richey speaks of her anguish when she didn't receive a letter from him from Iraq on Mother's Day. Three days later, when a package finally came, "I clutched it/to my chest, sobbing like an animal./ I spoke to no one,/did not apologize."

"I remember sitting back and taking a deep breath and going, 'Wow,' she was really communicating to me through that poem," says Ben.

"When I read that one, it became very clear to me that a lot of stuff we'd been arguing about, all that stuff was really silly. It was the relationship between my mom and I that needed to be mended, and I'm really happy about that."

"I think the poems were the way he could understand what I was feeling," says Richey, "and at the same time feel how much I loved him and that he was a good person and that (despite any political differences) I wasn't disparaging of the fact that he was a soldier."

Ben has been back from Iraq since 2006. He has changed, as Richey once feared, "but he's still a good man. Ben has a conscience and he has integrity, and they're still there."

She is relieved that he will separate from the military in June and attend business school at the University of California at Berkeley, in the fall.

Richey's book is bound to find an appreciative audience among mothers of soldiers, but I'm struck by how much any mother of a son, as I am, will relate to these poems: Boys harden into men; they shrug off a mother's protectiveness like a too-heavy sweater, retreating to places in their souls that will forever remain a secret to women.

"My son is always leaving," Richey writes. "Sometimes he looks back and waves goodbye. Sometimes/ he just disappears."

It's wrenching - all the more so because we can't stop thinking of what might happen to them when they're out of our sight.

As Richey notes: "Isn't that your job?/to whisper in the ear of/any god who'll listen: Please,/ protect him.

thornp@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5419

Frances and Ben Richey

* What: Appear at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Tattered Cover in LoDo, 1628 16th St.

* Cost: Free

* Information: 303-436-1070

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