My oldest is kind. She is compassionate. She is loving.

Drawing with shells at the beach.

Her laugh is infectious and can send my husband and I into a tearful laughter in seconds.

But for her, her life has been tough. On the outside, it seems like she lives a pretty charmed life. She’s lived in San Diego, Hawaii and Rhode Island. She gets to spend long weekends in Maine. She’s spent time in Washington. She has more frequent flier miles than most kids have by the time they are 18 years old. Her room is decorated like every little girls dream, with fairies, princesses, butterflies, dolls and lots and lots of books. She has friends all over the world that she still loves and cares for.

What most people never see is that my 4 year old daughter will not allow my husband to step out the door. She blocks the door and in order for him to even leave for work, I have to hold on to her, because she will chase him out the door. She loves him so very much that the thought that daddy might not be home after work, scares her.

Yet, everyday, he comes home after work. He’s home to put her to bed and read bed time stories. He’s here on the weekends and frequently spends all of that time with both kids. Come Monday, it’s the same cycle.

This happened in Hawaii, but there was no screaming. She just lost interest in all things around her. She would cry that she missed Daddy and that she wanted him to come home. We talked about how important his job was and after I exhausted myself trying 300 different ways to help her, I took her to a counselor.

If I could tell you how horrible I felt, if I could just put it into words – I would. I felt like the world’s worst mom.

I always hear people say that there is no way that a military child is ‘bonded’ with their military parent. I’m here to say, that’s simply not true.

My oldest daughter was born in September of 2007, my husband deployed in November and returned home in June of 2008 (or was it July…I can’t remember). She was 5 weeks old when he left and 9 months old when he returned. From the moment he stepped off the ship I have been chopped liver. He was immediately her best buddy, which is my favorite thing about them, they are so close and it’s so cute to watch them interact.

A month after he got home, he left again. Then they were in the yards and it was pure mayhem.

Then we moved to Hawaii, where his job required him to be at work almost 24/7 and even though they only left port for 2 months, the girls very rarely saw him. If he did come home it would be 1 am and he would leave again at 4am. Things started to go down hill with her about 5-6 months after her second birthday, but after counseling, she did SO much better with him being away so much.

Then we moved here and thought she’d be okay since he’d be home almost every day. For the first couple weeks here she cried when he left for work, but it was normal separation anxiety (there is normal for her and then there is abnormal which is where we are at now). She’d stop crying after he was gone. My husband went to Tennessee for a short jaunt in September of this year. It was her first week of school and we were concerned that she was going to have some issues. Surprisingly she did not.

But then something not so great happened. Where she had always been able to talk through her feelings with me (she would tell me she missed daddy when he was at work and we’d talk about how he’d be home for dinner and she’d say it just made her feel sad, but we’d find fun things to do), she suddenly stopped. I would continuously ask her how she was feeling and she clammed up. Finally, she told me that she was told that she wasn’t allowed to miss daddy. She had been told that it was not okay and then was given a reason on why she was not allowed to miss him.

Then, she progressively got worse…to the point we are at now. We went to a counselor 45 minutes away for most of the fall, but since we were only allotted 8 appointments, and her original pediatrician refused a referral (I’m still not sure why), we stopped. We stopped and she got sad all over again. I finally changed her Primary Pediatrician and got the golden ticket to see a new psychologist.

I was talking to her new pediatrician when he gave me a piece of advice.

Every military family endures stress. We live with it as if it’s just part of our lives. We live a life of “unknowns” and somehow, learn to cope with that unknown. For some military children, that “unknown” takes over. In the case of my 4 year old, she doesn’t know when Daddy is going to leave for a long time again. We can’t ease her mind and tell her it will never happen again, because we don’t know. I honestly never really looked at it like that. Which, you’d think being a mom, I would. I never stepped back and thought, “It must be stressful moving from San Diego, to Hawaii to Rhode Island all before turning 4 years old.” And while I thrive in a deployment situation; for her, I never thought, “It must really stink when you want to hang out with daddy and he’s gone so much.”

What I do know:

It is never okay to underestimate a child’s feelings. ANY child, military or civilian.

Four year olds don’t lie. I honestly didn’t believe her when she told me what was said to her, but I have been assured by a psychologist and her pediatrician that she is not lying to me – or them, there is no way she just made that up. Looking back I should have believed in her more than I did.

Regardless how long your service member is gone, it’s never okay to compare length of separation with a child having a hard time. “Your daddy is only gone two weeks, but ours is gone a year.” Not.Okay. Every separation is significant to them and they don’t quite understand time (or at least my 4 year old does not, 2 days and a year sort of meld together in her head).

While she is sort of an odd case and her pediatrician agreed that most of the time it seems older children are more affected by their parents deployments and separations, it does happen to little kids too.

If we totaled the time my husband has been home and compared it to the age of my oldest daughter, he’s been away approximately half of her life (probably more if you count underway and training time). That percentage will get smaller while we are here, but as far as mental health goes, we are looking at the long term picture, not just the here and now.

With all of that, there are positives that come out of this.

She will be a very resilient adult after learning how to cope with so much as a child.

I have noted the role that other military children play in her life. I picked her up at school one day, interrupting a conversation she was having with another child about how cool it is that both of their daddy’s are in the Navy and how proud they are of the things each others daddy’s do. These children are her support system, the people she leans on when the going gets rough. The children who understand what she is going through and what she has been through.

Keep in mind the things you say and do can affect the way a military child thinks. They are proud of their parents service. “Branch Rivalry” and “Rank Wars” can affect the way they think. While it can be a joke between parents, small children can not always sense sarcasm. After overhearing a conversation, my 4 year old came home and asked me why her daddy doesn’t do anything. I remember just standing in the kitchen and looking at her, trying to figure out how to explain it was just a joke. She perceived it to be the truth and thought we had lied to her when we tell her that daddy does important stuff for this country.

If you have a military child that you feel is having a hard time or for deployment tips, there are a lot of organizations out there that can be utilized.

Military Kids Connect - This site connects military kids together to help them cope with deployments. This will be an amazing tool when my daughter is 6.

Military Kids Speak - While this site is focused in North Carolina, it is a wealth of information even for those not in NC.

Deployment Kids

Operation Purple

Talk, Listen, Connect – Sesame Street - We have both of these videos and my kids really respond to them. They are so well done.

Zero to Three - Information for parents on the needs of young military children.