ADMIRAL BEAR

[Cynthia=Proud Nuke Mommy]

5am-My cell phone rings. Who can it be at this hour? Not a good thing having your phone ring at that hour when neither of your kids are home in their beds. Tad -----, a co-worker. What the heck does he want at this hour on Saturday morning. I hit the "Ignore" button and fell back to sleep. Yes I take my job just that seriously.

6:30am-Phone rings again. Bloody heck! By now I'm enjoying coffee with my husband. It's a nice morning and we are relaxing before we go to the barn to feed the horses. I decide to ignore the obnoxious ring, but a little voice told me to get up and answer the phone.

I check the number, it is unfamiliar so again I decide to hit the ignore button. For the second time, the little voice checked me and in a split second my mind was processing data. After all, my daughter was in Sacramento with her Fiance looking at his college campus & for a place to live. Perhaps she's calling from the hotel. Since when did California area codes begin with an "8?" I decide to take a chance and answer the call.

"Hi Mommy!" my son said!

To relive the moment brings tears to my eyes and I can hardly breathe. My boy called home. He could have called his girlfriend first, but he called me! And my husband of course! He sounded so good, upbeat, confident and as happy as a kid could be in unfamiliar surroundings, sleeping on a bed way too short for him.

And speaking of short, was that the fastest 3 minutes of my life or what? Ugh. Erik had won a five minute phone call home because he scored really high on a test. Five minutes!!! That's a long time when you are starving for contact! But, sadly, he wanted to call his girlfriend. I was magnanimous; I knew she needed to hear his voice and he hers. So I was the bigger person and let him go as she would have done the same for me.

But now that I'm at the end of my day and the sun has gone down I am feeling the pain of his absence all over again. In the sadness of his leaving, I was having difficulty processing the reality that he is gone. Gone as in he's not coming home. Intellectually you know it. In the real world you feel it; yet the mind tricks itself, compartmentalizes and says, "Just make it through to PIR and it will be OK."

But the truth of it is it won't be OK; not totally. We will have our hugs, my tears, his laughter and I will constantly have the need to be physically close, to hug again, and to just feel the space between us. It will be so exciting, so much fun, and I will be so very ecstatic. And they we will say our good-byes again.

Life is as it should be. He needs to do this, and if he comes home it will mean something went wrong; his dreams will be unfulfilled; and I don't want that. To be honest, as much as I miss him, I don't want him to come home, not permanently, that is. As awful as it sounds, as fearful as I am that I'll be misunderstood, I want him to not come home because I want him to fulfill his dreams even more.

He wrote home that his hero is Admiral Arleigh "31-Knot" Burke. It is Admiral Burke's career that inspires my son. How can I deny him that? As painful as it is to even think about, I find that I have to let my son go. He will always be his Mommy's Bear, but if all goes according to his plan, he will be a Navy Admiral and that provides me many more opportunities to board a plane and sit at the side lines and watch my baby boy.

Admiral Bear... Kind of has a nice ring to it...