And when you don’t have answers to those questions, that’s when they’ll send you to detention and tell you that they’ve secretly always loved the other kids more than you.
Nope, no trust issues here. You can totally have my six-digit iPhone lock screen passcode.
The next morning when I went downstairs for breakfast, I took a deep breath and worked up the courage to pitch my mom as she was washing dishes.
“Mom, I want to enlist in the military.”
“When?” she said.
“Right now.”
“But you’re only seventeen!”
“I know. That’s why I need you to sign these documents.”
My heart stopped as she put the dishes down and turned to look at me. Mentally, I started to chamber my speech. Emotionally, I worked to steady my trigger finger, because you only get one shot at unloading a magazine of hollow-pointed sympathy bullets into your mother. After a few seconds, she looked down and shook her head. Here it comes, I thought.
“Okay. If this is what you are passionate about, you—”
“You let my brothers do it!” I shouted back, not actually hearing a word she was saying.
“—can go too.”
Well, shit.
I was totally unprepared for her to be so cool about this, though in retrospect I shouldn’t have been. My mom was the only woman in a house with six boys. She kept that house together, figuratively and sometimes quite literally. She was Captain Calm of the U.S.S. Clusterfuck. Plus, she was no fool. She looked at the world with clearer eyes than any of us did. Think about it: She married a military man in a military family. She raised a bunch of boys intent on following in those footsteps, boys who trained to run toward the people shooting at them and who, in that training, taught themselves to feel invincible. She was the one thousands of miles away with the very real understanding that possibly more than one of the people she loves most in this world might not come home. It takes a special kind of person to live that life and not let the uncertainty and the fear affect everyone around you. You need to be strong, you need to be resilient, you need to be a patriot, and it doesn’t hurt if you can make chocolate chip cookies with just the right amount of gooeyness in the middle when your kid is not feeling well. My mom was all of those things, in spades. And culottes.
There should be a congressional medal for moms like her, though at the time the first emotion that washed over me was actually disappointment. I’d crafted this ingenious, unimpeachable argument in defense of my plan, and now I didn’t even get to use it. She’d stolen my thunder by being awesome, thanks a lot, Mom. Keep your shit together, I thought. Keep that speech holstered. Little did I know, this was only the first of many times when I would have to work hard to accept someone’s unconditional surrender to my demands instead of getting to blow them away like I really wanted.
Still a little off balance, I figured I should seize the moment and go straight to my dad to lock this fucker down. Since he’s a proud veteran, I thought getting his sign-off would be an easy task, especially with my mom already onboard. He’d understand, sign right away, I’d go in for the hug, instead he’d give me the handshake, I’d grow up that day, and then we’d cut to a commercial for Cialis and reverse mortgages.
Man, was I wrong.
When I handed him the paperwork, he looked at it, gave me a stern look, then told me to sit down.
I knew what that meant. My mom understood the passion aspect of military service. She didn’t just want her boys to be all they could be; she wanted them to be happy and fulfilled too. My dad could give a fuck about my passion if it didn’t also have some purpose behind it. He’d served, he knew what war is, he knew what it really meant. He wanted to make sure I knew what it meant as well. He wanted to know that I understood what I was getting myself into.
“You know we are at war, right?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
“You know this isn’t going to end anytime soon, right?”
“Maybe when I get there I can help speed up the process.”
“Uh-huh. Yeah, war is pretty quick, it will probably be over the day after you get there.”