You are beside yourself with worry. Your beautiful child has just climbed on board a C-130 transport plane with about 200 other innocents just like him, and you, along with all the other parents, are walking back to your cars, through a terminal or across an airfield, tissues pressed to your noses, everyone unashamedly tearful. Or you’re standing on a Navy pier waving and crying as his ship pulls out and you fear for his future.

You are more aware than at any other leavetaking that this could be the last time you see your son or daughter alive.

How can you help your child through this ordeal? How will you yourself survive it? Where will you turn for help? The answer is standing beside you, also waving and crying. There is strength in numbers, and you are about to need all the strength you can get. Introduce yourself and get to know your peers. You’ll all need each other in the months to come.

Perhaps you didn’t get to attend your child’s leave taking ceremony. Perhaps you, like me, were 2,000 miles away. Perhaps your good-byes were said at home a few weeks earlier. You can still find ways to contact the families of other troops deployed with your loved one. Make the effort to reach out to them. You’ll be grateful for their friendship in the coming months.

Aside from the all-important question of how your child is going to survive this deployment—literally and figuratively—another issue needs to be addressed: How will you survive it? This may be the greatest ordeal of your life, and you’re going to need some help.

You need information. You need support from the families of other deployed soldiers—those who have been through it before, and those who are going through it with you right now.

There are things you can actually do that will make this year go by relatively quickly and with less stress for you. Working on projects, individually and as a group, writing letters, setting up stations in your home that will make mailing packages easier, making sure your phone/communications system is set up so that you don’t miss any phone calls or e-mails, recruiting your friends and co-workers to help provide needed supplies for your soldier and his buddies, and more . . . things that I will explain in detail how to do that will help you make it through this “year of fear.”

I survived it and so can you. When it’s over, you’ll be stronger for having lived through it. You will know what needs doing, and you’ll do it. In the Army, a mission is a task you’ve been assigned to complete. Your child has a mission and so do you. That mission is the thing that will save your sanity and keep you going.

For this reason, I’ve written Mom’s Field Guide: What You Need to Know to Make it Through Your Loved One’s Military Deployment. Here you will learn all about how to complete your mission safely and with pride.

–Sandy Doell

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