How I Became a Military Mom

I expected boot camp to be life-changing for my son but for me? Not so much.

Last summer, my son enlisted in the US Marine Corps and I became a military mom. His decision didn’t catch me off guard but the impact of it, including how I understood myself as a parent and free-standing adult in the world, wasn’t what I envisioned.

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 school where he received a soul-nourishing education in an enchanted forest.

Adolescence arrived and high school and Covid kept him in town. I mostly left him to his own devices and he withdrew to his room, shrouded in a hoodie and playing Fortnite late into the night. 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 pursued patterns hidden among variables, building solutions step by step. I thought he might join the Army and become some type of engineer but that wasn’t the path he chose.

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 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 and 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 as he pulled paperwork from a folder boasting handsome men and women wearing the famous Dress Blues. The Few, the Proud — the Marine Corps’s brand-marketing beats all other branches of the US 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 fully-fledged adult? I’d 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 getting the family onboard is seen as a predictor of success in getting applicants into ‘utes’ and boots (standard issue uniform). The personable young Sergeant was there to recruit me.

My first brush with military culture as a parent was at a Wreaths Across America event a few years earlier. 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.

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 am not a natural ‘joiner’. Like many of the 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 search for a bucket to drop me into but this crowd didn’t even try. There were no awkward questions swirling in their eyes, 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.

Someone 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 continued the theme of 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 their picture. 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.

I didn’t feel like a military mom as I signed the consent form allowing the Dept. of Defense to assess if my child was physically, mentally, and morally fit to serve his country. I studied the USMC resources for parents, obsessing over YouTube videos while Mac started 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.

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.

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 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 taking as little with him on such a summer’s day forty years before. 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 that day too.

In Denmark, six hours ahead and an ocean away, I crouched in an airless upstairs bedroom, a migraine of grief clamped around my temples. Grief for my son, 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. 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 polo shirt leaving his arms exposed to the night air.

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

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 and I wasn’t but it didn’t matter. The Corps process challenged me too. How did I mother without the communication pathways, routines, and material of everyday life? What was left of my relationship with my child when the inessential was stripped away?

Life’s turning points are easy to identify in retrospect but first days begin more often with a sunrise rather than the flicking of a light switch. Sunrise for me was the heart-crushing ache as, arcing westward over the ocean, daylight swallowed the stars that mapped the distance between me and my son. I tried to imagine how Mac was faring in his darkness and it finally dawned on me, this is what it means to be a military mom.

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 yelling at their phones and each other. Mac was hoarse and laughing like he had as a kid full of birthday cake. He wore cammies and a buzz cut yet it seemed like years since I‘d seen him looking so much 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. Thousands of miles of ocean had shrunk to a hundred yards of asphalt.

The customary formalities were mercifully brief. Then the order to dismiss was given and, gratefully, we rushed forward to hug our Marines.

Thanks for reading. I warmly welcome you to respond, share, and follow.