We were getting ready for dinner when my 2-year-old stopped me.

“Mama!” she cried.  “Mama! Where’s Daddy’s food?”

I stopped, puzzled.  My husband has been deployed for months and months.  He hasn’t eaten a meal here in even longer.  I hadn’t set a place for him in ages, let alone made him up a plate of food like the rest of the family.

But my toddler kept on going.

“Mama!  Daddy’s food! What Daddy eatin’?”

She was pleading with me for an answer.

We did a few more rounds of asking about where her father’s food was located before I realized she was asking me if and when her father was eating.

If he sat down and had breakfast and lunch and dinner, even though he was far, far away and under the water in a submarine.

I assured her that Daddy had food on the boat, and he ate it down there when he wasn’t working.

She was happy enough with this answer and sat down to her own spaghetti and meatballs.

But of course I couldn’t let it go.

After telling my husband in an e-mail about the hilarious but taxing convo I had with our current youngest, I really thought some more.

My kids have always accepted that Daddy works on a boat.  And that quite often, that boat goes away, underwater like the little toy submarine they have in their bathtub.  He works on the boat to make sure we have a house and food and toys, and his job helps keep us and everyone else around us safe.

That’s their little world.  That they get.

But due to security clearances and very specific rules involving Ohio-class submarines, my kids’ reality is still only theoretical for them.

They have never seen where Daddy works.  Not even in pictures.  They never will. 

Even when they are old enough to tour the submarine, they won’t be allowed where he does his specific job.  It could be Neverland, for all they know.

They’ve never seen where he eats, showers or sleeps.

They know he does these things on the boat.  Just ask my 4-year-old.  Both my girls could say “Daddy’s on his boat” long before they could string together other words.

But what does it mean for them?

When they say it, what do they picture?

I honestly have no idea.

I hope they imagine their father in some boat festooned like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.  I hope they envision him chowing down on cupcakes and pizza and all their favorite things.  I hope they think he takes pink-soap bubble baths and sleeps in a Princess Elsa sleeping bag.

In other words, I hope the unknown doesn’t scare them.

Because truth be told, sometimes that very same unknown is exactly what scares me.