By Thereasa Black
Over the last thirteen months, I’ve been deployed and separated from my daughter. Over that time, I intended to write her a letter every day. I did not succeed in writing a letter every day, but I did write her 298 pages worth of letters. Tomorrow she and I will be reunited. I can’t explain how many times I have imagined this moment. Since the day that I left, I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to come back home.
“Since the day that I left, I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to come back home.”
I’ve been afraid that she will be upset with me or that she won’t want to come home with me. I realized that I can’t think about those things. There is no way for me to predict how this situation will play out, so I will just wait and see. I decided to share my last letter to my daughter with you.
April 8, 2019
Dear Little One,
You don’t know it yet, but today is the last day that you and I will be apart. It’s crazy because it feels like I only left you yesterday. That’s not to say that it seems as though this time has gone by quickly, it has not. It means that I can still feel the pain of leaving you. I still remember the last time that I you held my fingers as you fell asleep and I sang “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”. The feeling of my tears rolling down my face as I sang, “I just wanna stay with you in this moment forever.” In that moment, I knew that it didn’t matter what I wanted, I was going to miss something.
I was going to miss an entire year of your life. I was going to miss so much and there was nothing that I could do about it except ask those who wouldn’t miss a thing to try and take as many pictures as possible. They sent me videos, wrote me letters, and told me stories about the cute things that you did. It wasn’t enough to replace the fact that I couldn’t hold you in my arms or feel your tiny fingers wrapped around mine, but it was all that I had.
“I can still feel the tears rolling down my face as I sang, ‘I just wanna stay with you in this moment forever.'”
Impossible Explanations
I can’t explain to you how it feels to be a mother who doesn’t know how tall her child is, what size clothes you wear, how you like your hair styled, or how it feels to have my head nestled against yours. Each time that I see other small children with their mom’s, it just reminds me that I haven’t been a mom for the past year. There really is no way to make up for that. Members of the military do this all of the time. I met a few people who haven’t been home for more than a couple of months for the past four or five years. That’s not the life that I choose for you, that’s not the relationship that I want us to have.
“Each time that I see other small children with their mom’s, it just reminds me that I haven’t been a mom for the past year.”
My Shortcomings
I fell well short of writing you a letter every day and I’m sorry. Sometimes writing was too difficult for me because it only made me think of how sad that I was. I found many ways to keep myself busy in order to avoid thinking about you. Some days that was the only way that I could make it through the day. Please know, that I love you, I will always love you, and though I was away for a long time, I never stopped loving you. I will try to never leave you again. Hopefully, the next time that we are apart for such a long period of time, it will be because you are headed off to college.
Tomorrow we will begin a new chapter. We will start with a little package from Mommy to Bella and see where the rest of life takes us.
Love,
Mommy
