Early morning, we wake, dawn yet to break and the birds still silent. The baby is not yet ready to be fed but I wake her anyway and take her to my breast. She's sleepy but still finds her way. Around the house, I hear the sounds of someone preparing to leave, of drawers being checked, of zippers closing suitcases. I hear his combat boots pacing impatiently outside the closed door to the baby's room; he is waiting for us but I can't make the baby eat any faster.
"Daddy, are you leaving today?"
The sound of my 6 year old son's sleepy question turns my blood to ice. He knows today Daddy is leaving for war, he knows it is not safe, he understands Daddy will be gone for a long time.
Baby Nicole is finished quickly as if she knows something is amiss. However, she sits upright too fast and promptly throws up all over me. A quick change for both of us and we are ready to go. No one is in the mood to make jokes.
Before leaving the house, he wants me to find him a scarf or bandanna or something to tie on his military-issue duffel bags, to help distinguish them from everyone else's in the deployment line. I find a few bandannas and pray to God that the next time I see them they are in his hands and not with mortuary services.
Finally we pile into the car, silently, and drive to the flightline, the runway on base where his unit will fly to Iraq. Anxiety and panic is in my throat and I am only able to quell it by thinking about how much I smell like spit up. Without that to focus on, my mind reels wildly around all the fatal possibilities facing him and the depth of possible sorrow facing our family. Spit up never smelled so good.
We wait on the flightline, in an empty hangar for the plane to load. The troops are lined up behind a rope, dressed in their combat gear and all dragging the same drab green duffel. Everyone has some kind of floral scarf or bandanna or ribbon from their wife, girlfriend or daughter tied to it.
Andrew, our son, fiddles with dad's bandanna then with the laces on his dad's combat boots. He's not supposed to cross the deployment line. The commanders don't want wives and kids getting tangled up in hugging and kissing while the troops are supposed to be gearing up. But Andrew has found a spot between legs that he can crawl through to get to his Daddy and Daddy doesn't turn him away. Baby Nicole is just happy to smile at all the people.
The line starts to move and I have to fish Andrew out from underneath the pounding boots starting toward the door. As I pull him out, he starts to scream, "Daddy! No! I don't want you to die! Daddy please don't go! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!"
I have to hold him back but he is strong and determined. He breaks out of my arms and is caught in the arms of the base commander, who picks him up and tells him, "Daddy has a job to do."
Andrew replies, "His job sucks!"
I don't argue or reprimand him. I do wonder where he picked up the word "sucks" but later forget about it. The commander frowns at us with a lack of compassion that stupefies me. Meanwhile, we are missing our last chance to wave at Daddy as he disappears out the door and up the steps to the plane.
Andrew runs to the window screaming and crying, "Daddy!" His tantrum goes on for hours, days, doesn't even let up when he goes back to school. I end up sitting in the hallway outside his classroom for weeks until he starts to settle down.
The bottom drops out of me. Whatever safety net underlies our lives in general, that psychological function that blocks us from thinking about mortality every second of the day, that has disappeared. It turns out that beneath the net lies only an open abyss with no perceptible bottom, only darkness and falling, falling, falling....
Yet I hold it together for my children, wake each day like a robot, mother and love my children, care for them and try not to let the darkness enfold me. In spite of my attempts, each night after the children go to sleep, the abyss takes me into it's sinister embrace and holds me captive until morning, showing me images of death, of fear, terror, and violence. Knowing every day could be his last, I have nothing to cling to, no hope, no faith. Just nothing...
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