| <>It’s three in the morning and I just could not sleep. I awoke knowing I had to call my now grown baby and say good bye for what could be the very last time. I find it ironic that it was his mother who woke him and informed him he was running late for one of the biggest “field trips” of his life…and now I sit…because now… … I am “one of those moms”. We all know the ones; we see them in the movies and on television frequently. The women whose hearts drop at the site of a strange car in the neighborhood. Those women that hear the rumor of another “GI dead” because of the war that sit and wait in horrifying anticipation to thank God that someone else’s kid was killed instead of theirs. I am one of those women. A position I once thought was only in the movies. A position I did not believe I would ever have to live through, and a position I would gladly give up to any one of you…if you want it. I sit here and go through the memories in my mind. Pictures are torture as I found out the other day….memories of days gone by that you can not “redo” memories of times when war was such a distant word in American homes. Now it is here…slapping me in the face with every breath I take. As I think of the young baby I birthed so long ago, the little boy picking his butt in the out field of his tee ball games, the smile when he learned to play the trombone. His eyes when they lit up on Christmas morning. His hugs as he wrapped his little arms around my neck and said he loved me…..my baby is a man, one to be proud of and one that I just do not want to let go…. No words anyone could say will make this different for me, no “positive thinking” will dispel the fact that my son is now going into one of the worlds “hot zones” (and heating fast) and I may have just told him I love him for the very last time. There are no “band aids” that will fix the trepidations and fears I will go through waiting to hear from him again in three to six months….why do they do that…do they think it if funny to let the loved ones back home sit and worry…not even a call to say we are on the ground and safe in hell!! WTF!! (and for some….they are dead before they even get to make that “I’m here mom” phone call) again WTF?? So as I go about my day to day routine, Donnys working, thinking Britt is in math now, Lou is at recess, Josh is being blown up….sounds like a life that will be fun as long as I NEVER think!! So how do you dispel those thoughts of reality….I have taken off the “rose colored glasses” and this world sucks!! I stand firm to my beliefs that the Good Lord Jesus Christ will return soon and put and end to the madness we call life. The world we have worked so hard to turn evil….as we find secret thrills in making people torture themselves through thought. A world where compassion is no more and happiness is bought with money….a world I did not ever think I would see…I thought humans were smart? | 
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