The text comes at 11:00 a.m., moments before it’s story time for the three year-olds in the deaf classroom. My weekly opportunity for a concentrated hit of baby love, performance art, and professional interest is upon me, but I take a quick look at my phone. The classroom teacher finishes the song with movements designed for three year olds who must sit in chairs at circle time, but also move to the music only some of them can hear.

The text message is devastating; Atara denied visa. A stone the size of all motherhood falls from my heart to my gut as the images of Atara’s husband Ari and their boys flash before me. Ari and two of their six children live in the American Midwest where a year ago, Atara also lived and worked.

During a two week school vacation Atara traveled to Israel for the birth of her first grandchild. She visited the US embassy there for a routine visa renewal, only to learn that counter to her immigration lawyer’s advice, policy had changed, and the visa renewal had to be done in the U.S. Furthermore, there wasn’t enough time left on the old visa to allow Atara to fly back to the U.S. as scheduled.

The joyful visit, during the winter holiday of her job as a 3rd grade teacher suddenly became the beginning of a nightmare that had now meant 15 months of separation from her husband of 30 years, her middle and high-school aged sons, her job, her home and her life of the last eight years in the U.S. Her school replaced her, then downsized and fired Ari, also a teacher. They lost their home. No number of appeals to lawyers, congressmen, community leaders, or friends produced a solution. Atara was stuck in Israel without a home, without work, and without half her family. The text message was the most recent and hopeless of the setbacks. Now she would have to wait to see if her husband, eligible for months to apply for a green card, could get it and bring her back. They were looking at another six months at least…

Sickened, I put aside my thoughts and took my place in front of the four adorable children looking expectantly for the story to come, told from a book but brought alive with whatever enchantment I could muster to create narrative in their fragmented worlds. These were children with hearing loss ranging from moderate to profound and among them, skills ranging from formidable linguistic knowledge to severe delay; from total reliance on speaking and hearing with amplification to complete dependence on American Sign Language. What they all shared was higher than average cognitive readiness for learning, unusual for a special education class of this nature. They were a delight to teach.

I assumed my seat on the tiny chair that put me at their eye and attention level, and began the story Rainbabies. A loving but childless couple discover a dozen tiny babies during a moonlit rainshower and bring them home to become their treasured children. After a time, the rainbabies are reclaimed by their magical mother. The couple’s loyalty and love are rewarded with the granting of a human child of their own. The day outside the classroom was in fact a cold and rainy one and this favorite story had beckoned to me that morning as suiting the weather and the classic theme of children wanted, loved and protected.

Kaim, one of the preschoolers, was often restless during story time and today, more antsy than usual. Before I’d signed and gestured and spoken the second page, a realization like a thunderbolt struck me. What was I thinking? Kaim was here this week after nearly two weeks of absence, during which time his mother had been banished to East Jerusalem, having displeased her husband and his extended family one time too many. Though an American citizen, this Palestinian woman had violated some religious or cultural codes and an arrangement with her father in Israel had been made. She’d been sent with a one-way ticket. Daily she made desperate overseas phone calls to the school, wanting to speak with her children.

Here was Kaim, seated in the circle listening to a story of mothers and babies, lost and found. He was absorbing perhaps half of it, but certainly enough to combine with the late morning hour to produce a breakdown; tears poured down his handsome cheeks like the rain in the story. Like the unsettled rainbabies, he was being tossed in a boatload of troubles not of his making.

I signed, told, sang and acted out the rest of the story as quickly as possible and then helped the other children while the teacher held Kaim in her lap where he quickly escaped into sleep. A terrible irony was unfolding over the course of this morning. Mothers had been separated unwillingly from their children. One was a Yeminite Israeli orthodox Jew, one a Muslim Palestinian American. Both were victims of different systems that denied their right to live and work in freedom to care for their families. In Israel, the mothers live an hour away from each other, across an intractable battleground of religion and politics. They are two women who grieve for the children they cannot see. Here in America, the fathers live an hour away from each other, one longing for his wife, the other having expelled his, both attempting to care for and comfort their bereft sons, coping with the stress of shattered families.

In the end, it all comes down to people’s stories. On this morning the stories are of senseless misery for children, broken dreams and failed promises for parents. In a better world, the barriers of immigration entanglements, religious and marital hatred, cultural despotism, and simple human frailty would give way to the power of mothers’ and children’s need for each other. And I could do more than be a helpless observer of a terrible coincidence.