Inaugural

I said good-bye to my son on April 6th, and whether I wanted to or not, I had to stop hugging him eventually and walk away from him, despite every molecule in my body was saying "stay here for a little while longer." He is a soldier and he's going to do what soldiers do sometimes, and that is leave his home and do his duty and miss his wife and miss his parents and his sister and miss his friends.  How do I stop imagining all possible scenarios of the coming months when any number of things could happen to him?  How do I stop the tears from springing to my eyes when I'm driving down the road and a song comes on the radio or my iPod and a trigger goes off and I'm weeping?  And how do I stop being paralyzed by fear that I will never hug him again? I sure as shit am going to have to learn how if I want to maintain any semblance of normalcy for the coming months.

My son is nearly always the funniest person in the room when we are all together.  I worry that he will return from his time overseas a changed person, changed to the point that he can't be funny anymore.  I've read so many stories about soldiers coming back with their personalities warped, their psyches damaged, and I think "There's no way he could change to that degree." But you just never know.  We have to let him go and trust in God that he'll come back to us whole, the same funny young man we've always known.  I have no control over this and that's scary.  Yet I need to remember all the times I said good-bye to him and entrusted his care to someone else or some other organization.  First it was my parents who babysat him, then other sitters, then pre-school teachers, summer camp, and eventually when he went to college.  He has a solid foundation and a strong family background so all I can do is, once again, trust that he'll be all right. 

So far there doesn't seem to be much point to this blog entry.  Mostly I want to get written down things I'm thinking about. Isn't that what blogs are for?  I can't keep up this gloomy persona forever, so maybe once this is begun, I can start to find new perspectives.