Deployments sometimes take toll on kids in weird ways

The optometrist told me the first sign of presbyopia is the need to hold reading material at arm's length. He called it "long arm syndrome." I called it my trombone impression, squinting and moving my paperback or newspaper or medicine bottle back and forth until I could read the type.

"Welcome to your 40s," the guy said, sending me out to try dozens of frames.

I didn't mind that much. I wasn't upset about getting the glasses. They didn't make me feel old or anything. It was only when I got home and found that I'd bought exactly the same glasses I had in the second grade that I got upset. Same shape. Same tortoiseshell frame. Same sudden emphasis on the downturn of my mouth.

See, the last time I picked these glasses, I didn't actually need glasses. That was the year my dad was doing an overseas tour at the end of the Vietnam War. I told my mother I had headaches but wouldn't take aspirin. I complained that the letters of my books were too blurry to read, then hid in the closet to read Nancy Drew by the light of the crack under the door. I insisted I needed glasses. I lost those glasses after a month.

I was a weird kid who had a feeling she was missing something. Now, of course, I can see pretty clearly I was missing someone. It just didn't feel like that at the time.

Every time I put on these new glasses, I feel so sorry for my mother. Not just because she struggled to pay for those glasses, but because she didn't know what to do with me. Was I just her weird second-grader doing weird second-grader things, or was this part of the deployment? Was this some canary signal from the war that she should deal with immediately or a nothing she should ignore?

As military parents, I think we can be pretty sure of ourselves when it comes to babies and toddlers and preschoolers. As long as we keep their routines, they can weather a deployment. Our teens have plenty of ways they can let us know exactly how they feel about a parent's absence.

But those 6- to 11-year-olds are tricky. Their reactions can come out in weird ways. A friend's second-grader put up a shrine when her father went to Iraq - pictures, mementos, flowers. A Marine wife told me her kindergartner could not stop talking at bedtime once her dad deployed. The little girl stayed up for hours.

During a deployment when my own son was in second grade, he woke up one morning, walked out on the front porch and performed his daily ablutions into the bushes - in front of the whole bus stop.

It's a funny family story now, but then he was my weird second-grader doing a weird thing that might or might not mean something bad about the deployment.

As a parent, I remember hoping it was nothing, worrying that it was not. When military spouses come to me with these stories now, I send them straight to Military OneSource (1-800-342-9647), a program provided by the Department of Defense that

hooks up military families with counselors by phone 24/7. It's always good to chat with a professional when you feel out of your depth.

But I also think that sometimes during deployment we have to do our own version of "long arm syndrome." We have to look at the behavior of our kids at various lengths until we can read it clearly. It isn't ever comfortable. It isn't ever really clear. Until someone looks at it again years later with the unflinching clarity of hindsight.

Jacey Eckhart, jacey87@mac.com