Ethan's buddy was the child of civilian friends who, I discovered afterward, support the troops but openly discuss their antiwar feelings with their son. Every parent will choose what's best for their kids, of course. But now our two boys stood face to face, arguing about whether or not Ethan's father was a murderer.
Ethan's nightmares began that night.
So I made an appointment with a civilian social worker on base. I wanted to ask if she could recommend a way through the crisis. I wanted book titles, too -- I hadn't abandoned that dream. Ever the diligent student, I uncapped my pen as soon as I sat on her couch. I jotted down tips, ideas, resources and her thoughts on our particular situation. None of it was very satisfying.
"I'm just not sure how to explain it all to him," I finally confessed.
"Could you tell him his dad is fighting for freedom?" she suggested.
I put my pen down. Now I was truly alone.
"No," I said.
I had come in search of a road forward, but instead I found myself on a brain-rattling gravel path that dead-ended in the middle of nowhere. There were no thoughtful answers. Even a trained social worker was offering slogans as a method -- or a substitute -- for coping. Maybe there was simply no good way to maintain a child's emotional health during deployment, because sending a father off to war is an abnormal, traumatic experience that is rectified only when he returns. (Or perhaps never, for all I knew.) Maybe I hadn't been able to find any satisfying children's books on deployment because there just isn't anything reasonable to say.
When I arrived back home, I reexamined the pile of books I'd rejected months before, wishing just one held the key. I knew nothing could lessen the kids' yearning for their dad. I wasn't looking for that. I just wanted the deployment to make sense to them, in the most personal way possible.
Normally, writing would have been my answer. But I write newspaper and magazine articles, not children's books. Still, at my desk one morning, I started absent-mindedly drawing pictures of Ethan and his dad on a page in my notebook. I stuck a few happy-face stickers around the edges. I felt like I was in kindergarten. Then I wrote a few captions for the drawings, but I started running out of space, and my handwriting was sloppy, so I opened up my laptop.
When I looked up next, a few hours had passed. I printed out a dozen pages, and decorated them with stickers and stamps. I glued on photos that Ethan had never seen before. I stapled a makeshift binding along the side. I called my book "The Good Day: Having Fun While Dad's Away." It held between its two thin covers everything I wanted to say to the kids about Scott's deployment. My credentials were tenuous. I was just a mom. But that qualified me as an expert in the small picture: the domestic sphere.
The next day, I asked Ethan and Esther to sit next to me on the couch. I reached for the book. Ethan was uncharacteristically withdrawn, but he oohed and aahed over the stickers. The kids turned each page together as we read. I wondered, yet again, if I was handling the separation the right way. After all, I had pored over volumes of pamphlets and fliers on getting kids through deployment. No one ever mentioned writing one's own book.
As we reached the last page, Ethan looked up at me.
"Mommy?" His eyes were shining. Were those tears?
I felt I had totally blown it. Perhaps our military family in the making, still so emotionally fragile, could not withstand any further trauma. In that moment, I second-guessed myself on everything that had taken place since the day Ethan was born. Suddenly parading before my eyes were four years of bad decisions, missed opportunities and wrong turns that would surely land us on the "Dr. Phil" show.
"Mommy?" he repeated.
"Yes, my love?"
Ethan smiled the lopsided, closed-mouth grin that reminds me of my husband. It was the first moment in weeks I'd seen a spark of his old self.
"Read it again."
About the writer
Alison Buckholtz is a writer living in Anacortes, Wash. Her memoir on life as a military family will be published by Penguin in 2009.
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