Deployments & Motherhood

One of our primary functions as a parent is to provide our children with a moral compass – to give them an example and guidelines of right and wrong. We all want our children to grow up to be compassionate respectable contributing members of society. Or maybe you want your kid to grow up to be a serial killer. Either way, they learn their ways, their foundation, from their parents.


If we teach them to lie, deceive, swindle and just create drama in general, this is the world that we are creating for future generations. Now, as a mother of 4, I absolutely know how hard parenting is. There is no other job out there that is more draining, thankless and yet rewarding and fulfilling at the same time. And no one knows like my children how imperfect I am in that job. I’m sure it’s debatable at times whether they’d even give me a passable performance review. But like all mothers, I try and sometimes I fail.

But then I remind myself that it’s not always the big moments and milestones in life that give you the opportunity to parent your child. It is the little moments, how you treat others and interact with the world around you, especially when you think they’re not looking, that really shape their hearts and minds.

One of my proudest parenting moments was when I didn’t think any of my children were around. I was pregnant with Julia….VERY pregnant. It was actually 3 days past her due date. Katherine was 3 and she and Greg had just dropped me off for an OBGYN appointment. They were going to run a quick errand and come back. I got out of the car and they drove off. As I walked…I mean waddled… up to the building, there was an elderly woman with a walker who was struggling to get up over the curb and people were just walking around her. I walked up to her and asked if she needed help. She looked at me with such relief and grabbed my arm. I lifted her walker and helped her up the curb. I stayed with her as she shuffled down the walk and we went up the handicap ramp and into the building. She thanked me and I went on with my day, not thinking much of it.

When I got in the car an hour or so later, miserable because that stupid doctor wouldn’t induce me until I was a full week late, Katherine immediately says “Mommy, I saw you help that lady. That was very nice of you.” I hadn’t seen Greg loop the parking lot and pull out of a different exit. Katherine had been watching the whole time as I helped the elderly woman.

It was at that moment that I realized the magnitude of my role as her mother. I use that memory as my gauge for my actions as I continue on this horrifically terrifyingly amazing ride of motherhood. How would I want my children to react in this situation? What do I want my girls to learn from this? It was these questions that got me through this deployment.

What do I want to teach my daughters about the power and emotions of being a woman? I want to teach them strength, courage, love and independence. I want them to be able to face their fears and know that they can overcome any hardship. I hope this deployment has showed them those qualities in me. I hope they saw that we will have bad days – days that we are brought to tears and can barely get out of bed, days that anything that can go wrong will go wrong and days that it feels like the entire world is about to rain down on us. I hope they also saw that as long as we keep our head up and find the silver lining in everything, there are good days around the corner – days that the sun is shining and we have an adventure, days that we get a surprise letter or package in the mail from Daddy to lift our spirits and days like tomorrow when he will step off the plane and back into our arms.

This deployment has been challenging but we have gotten through alive and stronger because of it. So as this long excruciating deployment comes to an end…Forget about Handing Over the Coffee… all I want is my husband.