I’m not just the mother of boys. During the summer months I’m also the mom of a teenage girl. My stepdaughter is fantastic. She’s kind and beautiful, smart and feisty. I may be biased, but hey, I’ve loved her since she was 2 ½. She was the best wedding present I could have been given.

Parenting stepchildren during deployment is a very different task, especially when that child is raised away from a military community. This year, my daughter wore her father’s unit shirt to school.  At the time, we were in Gunman Company, and the front read, “Gunman Girl.”  The back had an apache (my husband’s dirty mistress) and read our company motto, “Guns for Hire.”  She was asked to remove it at her rural Pennsylvania school, because it “promoted violence.”  She stood her ground and won her case, but dealing with a military child during deployment wasn’t exactly something that school district was used to. 

My sons have never been asked to remove a company t-shirt at their school. There’s sensitivity in our schools which are around military bases often attended by children of deployed soldiers. My second son attends a deployment group at school where he can talk about his feelings, put together a “write-to-daddy” kit and meet with other kiddos going through the same thing. 

My daughter doesn’t have that luxury, and no one around her understands what she’s going through.  When she was terrified of two uniformed soldiers in her principal’s office, no one understood why. The adults knew that those soldiers were there for recruiting. However, my daughter’s first thought was that they were there to notify her of her worst nightmare.  But no one understood. How could they when the military is so foreign to them?  The military might not be a part of my daughter’s daily life, but it certainly is part of her daily thoughts and worries. 

Though the pressures of deployment weigh differently on her than my boys, in some ways lighter, and in others, not, she’s still experiencing the same torturous time we are, but without the physical support of our military family.

This is our fourth deployment and I’ve always taken my daughter for her summer visitation, even when my husband isn’t here. The way I look at it, there are seven members of this family. So even if one is missing, she’s still part of the 6/7 not deployed. It’s not just her dad she’s visiting, but her brothers and me.

When she’s here, she asks tons of questions, some innocent, some rather macabre, and I answer for her as honestly as I can. I know that during the rest of the year, there’s no one near her to answer these, so if I get inundated with her inquiries while she’s here, I’m okay with that. It’s what she needs. 

I’ve heard people say, in regards to stepchildren, “It’s not the same for them, because they’re not here.  They don’t live this day to day, so it’s easier.”  Maybe in some ways, it is.  Maybe out-sight-out-of-mind applies to our stepchildren, but they also deal with a lack of understanding and people who aren’t prepared to deal with the special needs of a military kid enduring deployment.  It doesn’t matter if they’re in the house or not, their parent is still deployed, and they’re still going to worry. 

Stepchildren, especially those raised away from our military world, need a little more love, support, and understanding from us during deployments. We give her the best opportunities to communicate with her dad, expose her to other military kids, bring her on base and make sure she knows she fits in here.  We give her as much support as we can during the summer, because we know that even though we’re only a phone call away in winter, it’s just not the same. 

Here’s to military stepchildren. Hug ‘em if you got ‘em, folks. I know I do.