Getting Involved

This weekend I signed up to do some sewing for SewMuchComfort.org. Just looking at the clothing items they need breaks my heart. But somewhere some mother's son or daughter is wounded in such a way as to need these clothes. I can sew -- I can't stop a war or even keep my own children out of it -- but I can sew.

Our youngest son is coming home for his "goodbye" visit Wednesday morning; he'll be here until the following Tuesday. There is still a chance he'll either stay back for three months or have the TOC duty for three months in Iraq due to his knee surgery. Either way, duty in Iraq is inevitable, but three months gets our other son within three to four months of coming home.

The old saying "my heart is in my throat" is more than a saying -- it truly describes exactly how I feel physically. I've tried to remember the days when there was no war but I can't even recall what that felt like. The only year we had none of the three in Iraq was 2005. A friend had come over to our house in Dec 2001 and remarked "I don't even realize there IS a war until I come over here." That was when the US invaded Afganistan and our daughter-in-law was serving in Uzbekistan. I'd just come through cancer surgery and that, together with our daughter-in-law's deployment, made the memories of that time very odd and uncomfortable. Throughout 2005 both my son and his wife were "on notice" of possible deployment together so there was no comfort there either.

Has anyone ever really imagined how life must have felt during World War II? What I'm going through now is NOTHING compared to that time in history -- especially for the people in Europe who were being bombed while their husbands and sons were fighting on the front lines. Imagine just receiving a LETTER once in a while and not knowing where your family members were. I panic if I don't get an e-mail everyday. I think a lot of Americans forget history -- what are the major events in history? Wars. Human nature seems driven toward conflict. The people who hate and pass the hatred onto their children are, in my opinion, the makers of wars. When a person is raised from birth to hate another race or religion and brought up to want to kill the "enemy" how can there be any hope of establishing what we think of as "normal life" in their communities?

Just thought for this day.