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My husband put his arm around me and we walked back through the corridors. Marla Maples said that you just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, no matter how hard it seems. ("Life is full of ups and downs.") So we walked, one foot in front of the other, past the saxophonist (playing "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?") and beyond the wavy glass wall. "If you are walking in darkness, without a ray of light, trust in the Lord and rely on your God," Isaiah says (50:10).

A friend of Ruth Graham's once told her: "You have the right to ask the Mighty One to do more for your children than he could if you were with them. Open thy mouth wide." I decided to stop focusing on my son's choices and start focusing on God's trustworthiness.

This ushered in the next stage of my sojourn as a prodigal's mother: release and trust.

When I read Luke 15 and "The Parable of the Two Lost Sons" (as my husband calls it) soon after that moment, I approached it not as a seminary graduate, but as a struggling mother looking for some help. I was struck by the complete omission of any reference to the Prodigal's mother in that parable.

Where is she?

Thinking about it from the vantage of a mother who, at times, has felt as lost as her son, her absence made perfect sense. Prodigals, I would think, by definition, assert their autonomy in a way that most dramatically severs the intimate parental bonds. And in many cases, that intimacy goes back to the heart of their mothers. That severing leaves mothers like me without a role. So we retreat, emotionally disoriented, physically fatigued, spiritually embattled. (Fathers probably do, too, but that's another article.)

I realized that I needed to subsume my role as tormented mother under that of being a trusting daughter—waiting on God in faith. That didn't mean I stopped praying and weeping for my son. But it helped me understand why, perhaps, "the mother" is not a player in this parable.

My guess is that she was there. She was probably where I have found myself throughout all stages of this sojourn: behind a closed door, looking out a window, waiting for her son to come home.

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October 26 1998, Vol. 42, No. 12