Parenting Like I Never Expected

I told my kids they could be anything they wanted, military didn't cross my mind

Surprise! Mac and Scout in Simpler Times

It’s August. Exactly two years ago, my son enlisted in the US Marine Corps and went off to Recruit Training. The decision about his career choice didn’t catch me off guard but the impact of it, including how I understand myself as a parent and a free-standing adult in the world, wasn’t what I envisioned.

I expected boot camp to be life-changing for my son but for me? Not so much. This is the story of how I became a military mom.

Innocent Beginnings

I sometimes refer to myself as a ‘recovering British Hippy’, which is shorthand for ‘I’m a leftie-liberal who doesn’t belong here in the States, but I’m trying… sorta’.

I birthed my son at home, fed him butter from grass-fed cows he knew by name, and let him watch the occasional wholesome family movie but no TV shows. From the age of three to fourteen, I took him to a small Waldorf (Steiner) school where he received a soul-nourishing education in an enchanted forest.

Adolescence arrived and high school and Covid kept him at home, in town. I mostly left him to his own devices and he withdrew to his room, shrouded in a hoodie and playing Fortnite until late in the evening. When he eventually emerged, he was a head taller than me and his voice had dropped into his outgrown sneakers.

I recognized early on that my son wasn’t cut out for college. When I asked his teacher what she thought his learning style was she said, “Kinesthetic”. His thinking was shaped by movement as he searched out hidden patterns in variables and built solutions step by step. Signs that he might join the Army and become some type of engineer? But that wasn’t the path he chose.

First Steps

My son is on active duty so I’ll call him Mac for now, the nickname of his great-grandfather who signed up for World War I while underage and volunteered again for World War II despite being in poor health and ‘too old’. My grandad was a civil engineer by then and the Allied Forces needed bridge builders.

Mac was two weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday when he first stopped by the USMC recruiters’ office so my signature was needed before the enlistment process could begin.

Sergeant Flores sat at my kitchen table in an immaculate tan and navy uniform. I looked at the ‘blood stripe’ running down the seam of his pants to his spit-shined shoes while he pulled out paperwork. The folder boasted men and women with steel-cut jaws, standing shoulder to shoulder in their famous Dress Blues. The Few, the Proud — the brand-marketing for the U.S. Marine Corps beats all other branches of the military hands down.

I asked Sgt. Flores, why the hurry — why not wait a couple of weeks until Mac could legally sign himself up as a bona fide adult? I had heard stories about recruitment quotas and, at the time, I was cynical about his answer which had to do with getting a better choice of MOS (job specialty).

Now though, I have learned that having the family onboard improves the chances of success in getting recruits through the enlistment process and into utes and boots (the standard issue uniform). In hindsight, I realize the personable young sergeant was there to recruit me.

Harbingers

My first brush with military culture as a parent was a few years earlier, at a Wreaths Across America event. My son wanted to join the Sea Cadets, the Navy’s youth program, and there were releases to sign and a check to write. We arrived at the Veterans Cemetery early but, by the time I finished the paperwork, the honor guard and standard bearers were lining up and it seemed rude to leave.

Cold December rain drummed on the roof of the tent as I moved into the crowd of families and military personnel who were all sensibly wearing mud boots. I’m an introvert, not a natural ‘joiner’. Like many who are unrooted and dispossessed, I am acutely aware of my otherness when I encounter congregations of new people. I’m bi-racial, not White not Black, and my accent seems to suggest privilege to those who have little and to confuse or offend those who have plenty.

I’ve had sixty-some years of watching people try to decide which bucket to drop me into but not this crowd. There were no awkward calculations furrowing their brows, they just nodded hello and went straight for a warm ‘How are ya?’

A veteran friend later told me how the military is a great leveler for people of all types and backgrounds who are in need or want of opportunity. “No atheists in a foxhole”, the saying goes, and it seems the worst of bigotry also takes a back seat when your survival depends on the allegiance of the person next to you. I had found myself in a figurative as well as literal big tent.

A lumpy man in a top brass uniform gave the opening address then a veteran Staff Sergeant took over as MC. He wore well-traveled denims and a leather biker vest covered with battalion patches, MIA/POW and other emblems. Sarge talked about remembrance of the ideals and service freely given that had brought us to this place on this day. There was no stage and he prowled around the tent as he spoke, cajoling, inspiring, and making in-jokes I didn’t quite get. He was like a wiry sheepdog herding us all together until even I felt like family.

Then, he came to a halt in front of the assembled flags and gave a solemn, heartfelt invocation. Outside, a bugler played Taps and in the silence that followed, I felt as if it must be raining all over the world.

The walls around us were lined with military portraits of men and women who had been killed in the line of duty. As each name was called, Gold Star family members came forward to hang a holiday wreath below the picture of their loved one. On the portrait stand next to me, a young woman with stricken eyes and trembling hands hung a wreath for her brother.

I wished desperately that her parents were somewhere nearby.

Prepare for Launch

I didn’t feel like a military mom as I signed the consent form allowing the Dept. of Defense to assess my child’s physical, mental, and moral fitness to serve his country.

I studied the USMC resources for parents and obsessed over YouTube videos, while Mac spent more and more time hanging out at the recruiters’ office. I wondered if he understood what he was getting himself into and how it might change his outlook on life. I didn’t consider how it might change mine.

Then, out of the blue, Mac’s ship date was moved up by two months. I would be away on a long-planned trip to Europe when he left. I told myself it was okay and tried to make up for it in our last days together. When he drove me to the airport I felt guilty as hell but I still wasn’t seeing the bigger picture.

The penny finally dropped on the hot, clear summer’s day when Mac set off for boot camp with only his ID, the clothes on his back, and $20 in his pocket. My younger brother had left home on such a summer’s day, and taken as little with him. David went out for a drive on the back of his friend’s new motorcycle and died when they crashed headlong into an oncoming car. I was far from home and busy with my own plans on that day too.

Forty years later, I was in Denmark, six hours ahead and an ocean away from my child. I crouched in an airless upstairs bedroom, a migraine of grief clamped around my temples. Grief for my son mixed with for my mother who had lost her son more suddenly and completely than I had ever understood before.

Struggling to breathe through the weight in my chest, I grieved for some part of myself that no longer belonged to me and for everything else gone that I didn’t even know about yet.

Day One

Day One; the USMC videos have given me a good idea of what’s happening back in the States.

I watch gulls wheel across the horizon beyond Copenhagen harbor and think of Mac flying alone for the first time, chasing through the terminal to make his connection.

Tired and hungry, he would board a white school bus in the dark. A long drive before stepping onto the legendary yellow footprints, his thin summer shirt exposing his arms to the night air.

At a row of telephones used only by Recruits to make their last call home, he would yell a script into the receiver while the Drill Instructors yelled at him to yell it louder. Then, without waiting for a response, he would slam the receiver down on all family sentiment, his head would be shaved and the names I had chosen for him 18 years before would be packed away with his civilian clothes.

Processing

The process of making Marines begins with breaking down individuals so that they can be rebuilt as strong, effective members of the Corps. Mac had signed up to ‘embrace the suck’ and he was ready to be made to feel as disoriented and uncomfortable as possible, to see if he was up to the challenge. I hadn’t signed up and I wasn’t ready but that didn’t matter, the process challenged me too.

What was my role as a mother without the communication pathways, routines, and material of everyday life? How could I support my child in an environment so far away, so completely alien, and unknown to me? One designed to separate him from his reliance on home comforts the better to bind him to a brotherhood he might one day need to save his life?

Life’s turning points are easy to identify in retrospect but new days begin with a sunrise not the flick of a light switch. Sunrise for me was a heart-crushing ache as, arcing westward over the ocean, daylight swallowed the stars that mapped the distance between me and Mac. As I tried to imagine how he was faring in his darkness, it finally dawned on me—this is what it means to be a military mom.

Families gather for graduation, hoping to catch a glimpse of their new Marine during the sunrise run aboard Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina

At graduation aboard MCRD Parris Island, I sat in the bleachers with 300 other military families, my new extended family. I looked around wondering who was there for the friends Mac had told me about in his letters.

Letters had been our only contact for 14 weeks except for a phone call the week before when the Recruits had received the title United States Marine along with access to their cell phones for three hours of liberty.

Mac had called from the food court on base, sitting at a table full of jubilant young men cramming burgers, pizza, and fries into their mouths while also shouting at their phones and each other. Mac was hoarse and laughing like he did as a kid full of birthday cake. He wore camouflage and a buzz cut yet, somehow, I couldn’t remember when he had looked more like himself.

In the stands, there were gasps and cheers as Charlie Company marched proudly onto the parade deck. The lump I had been carrying in my chest rose up to my throat choking tears. At last, the thousands of miles of ocean had shrunk to a hundred yards of asphalt.

Parris Island processes more 20,000 Recruits each year and those in charge know their Graduation Day audience—the formalities were mercifully brief. When the order to dismiss was given, the families rose as one and we rushed forward to hug our Marines. I was officially a military mom.

Graduation Day! Mac with Scout in front of the hatches he will also pass through as a Recruit a few weeks later; Mac in Dres Blues; me with Scout bringing Mac home on leave

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