Your military life through the eyes of your military mom

She saw her son standing in formation and said, “Look, he’s wearing his little outfit.”

A drill sergeant overheard her, turned around, and said, “BDUs, ma’am. It’s not a little outfit. Welcome to the Army.” She wanted to vomit. Just sayin’.

How could a mother be prepared for that moment? Mom didn’t get an orientation packet at basic; no pamphlet was slipped under the door with proper terminologies and nomenclatures. One day, she’s the woman who packed his lunch and knew where everything was.

Next day, a stranger with sergeant’s stripes is correcting her vocabulary, and the son she raised is standing at parade rest like he was built for it. For the mother watching from the bleachers, boot camp graduation isn’t just a ceremony. It’s the first time she understands, in her bones, that he belongs to something bigger than her now.

This is what she never tells anyone who asks. This is the view from the other side of every enlistment.

The Duty Station Lotto

When soldiers get their duty station assignments, the parents gather and compare notes the way people do at a car dealership, quietly calculating who got the better deal. When the assignments came down, another boy in the group was headed straight to Iraq. Her son was going to Germany.

She felt guilty about being happy it wasn’t him, then she felt guilty about feeling guilty.

That unique feeling, where relief and grief trade places every few minutes, is the private prison of every military mom who ever sat in a waiting room with other parents and wondered who was going home with the harder news. Nobody talks about it out loud, but it seems everybody does it.

Researchers who have studied military families describe a pattern of fear, anxiety, helplessness, and loss of control that begins the moment a parent learns their child has enlisted, and doesn’t fully resolve until that child is home for good.

Parents of service members are often the forgotten population in the literature on military family stress, overlooked in favor of spouses and children. The moms, in particular, tend to just absorb it.

Germany was fine. Germany was temporary. Iraq and Afghanistan were next, and they were not temporary at all.

Three deployments. Iraq in 2004-2005. Afghanistan in 2013. Afghanistan again in 2015. That’s three years, across two theaters, of figuring out how to love someone from twelve time zones away using flat-rate boxes and the United States Postal Service.

She became an expert. She knew the APO zip codes by heart, knew which items would sail through and which would get a package pulled. And she knew that liquid medicines containing alcohol were on the prohibited items list for packages headed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Imodium found its way regardless, as well as the Robitussin too, tucked deep, camouflaged under dehydrated meats and instant coffee like contraband in a suburban kitchen drug operation.

She couldn’t bear the thought of him sick, somewhere in Baqubah, Iraq, with nowhere to go poopies and nothing to make it better. So she broke the rules, sealed the box, prayed the SWAT team wouldn’t eventually bust through her windows, and drove to the post office.

That’s not defiance; this is a mother’s math.

Every care package was its own small act of war against the unknown. The snacks he actually wanted, like beef jerky, she didn’t eat, but knew he liked. The handwritten notes she folded tight so they’d fit without adding weight. She packed those boxes the way she used to pack his school bag, with the specific knowledge of one person’s exact needs, tucked into a container headed somewhere she had never been and never wanted to go.

A Long Wait

The calls came when they came, through messenger, choppy and brief. She’d sit by whatever device was nearest, willing it to make a sound.

And then it would. His voice, scratchy through a weak connection, running through the basics. He was fine. Things were fine. And then: “I gotta go. I’ll be gone a few days on a mission.”

The line would go quiet, her stomach would not.

She is not alone in that experience either. Across the country, in kitchens, living rooms, and office break rooms, military moms were developing their own coping infrastructure on the fly.

Facebook groups became the primary support network. She joined every one she could find. Mothers of the military, moms of soldiers, moms of this branch and that branch, moms of kids deployed to this theater or that one.

Eventually, she found the one that fit best. The offshoot group. A splinter cell of mothers who had moved past the stage of coping and arrived at something closer to organized survival. The Purple Whine Bus. Motto: just breathe. She’s still a member.

She is in good company, too. Across the country, groups like BAMM, which stands for Bad-Ass Military Moms, were popping up, monthly gatherings of women who understood exactly what it felt like to watch a messenger window go dark and wait for it to light up again.

The name alone tells the whole story. These are not women who fell apart; they built a phalanx of support, paving the way for future generations of military moms. These women do not fall apart.

Ma, I Was in a Firefight

There’s a sentence that lives in a category of its own. It’s not delivered with drama. It comes out almost casual, after the fact, the way someone might mention they got caught in traffic or missed a train. He’d call, everything would sound normal, and then it would land.

“Ma, I was in a firefight.”

She is still counting the gray hairs from those calls. She says it was like Moses coming down from the mountain, which is the most accurate description anyone has ever given of what a mother looks like when her anxiety has been operating at full alert for twelve months, and the news finally arrives after the fact, when nothing can be done; and nothing needs to be done but stand there and take it.

Keep a Light On

Then an epiphany. Every single night, she would light a candle and place it in the window. Every single night until her kid came home, because the yellow ribbon around the tree just wasn’t enough. She needed something more, something that said that this house was still waiting, still open, and still counting the days.

Every mother who memorized the sound of a government car pulling up to a house and said a prayer every time a car slowed down on her street. Every mother who said “he’s fine” at dinner and meant “I have no way of knowing that, and I am choosing to say it anyway, because the alternative is unspeakable.”

The military asks a lot of the people who serve. It asks something different, and no less real, from the people who stay behind. It asks them to be strong without a rank, to wait without a mission, to love without the ability to do anything useful with that love except pack another contraband care package and answer the phone on the first ring every single time.

Those mothers deserve their own story, from someone who knows what they gave up every time they watched a car drive away toward a flight line.

To the moms who called it a little outfit before they learned the vocabulary. To the moms who smuggled anti-diarrhea medicine and willfully broke international mail regulations because love doesn’t read the prohibited items list.

To the moms who sat by the phone until the screen went dark, then sat there some more. To the moms of the Purple Whine Bus, and BAMM, and every other group of women who decided that surviving this thing was easier if you didn’t do it alone.

To the ones who kept the candle burning.

You thought you were never part of this missions, but you were the ones who made it all possible.

Until the next drop, stand easy.

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