“He told me he was scheduled to return home five months early. I was excited but if you know the military things are always changing. We told our boys we were going to the airport to pick up my sister. He planned it all out.”
‘They ran towards him. ‘Daddy, are you gonna die?’ Deployment was 10 months. We planned a surprise. I never mentioned it. I didn’t want to get my hopes up.’
‘It was midnight and everyone was asleep. I texted my friend, ‘Come quick! I need you. Lots of blood.’ I prayed she’d wake to the sound of her phone.’
“On a whim, I decided to download a dating app. I came across a man who was in the Army. I knew he was ‘the one’ the moment I saw his photo. At first sight, I was in love. Something I had never felt before.”
‘I love you, and I’m home.’ He wrapped me in a warm embrace. We had a fairy tale image of what our life would be. The next year was a whirlwind of emotions.’
“We lived off ramen noodles and ham sandwiches. We slept in forty-five minute increments. ‘I miss us,’ he said. The spark of our honeymoon years quickly faded, and life together felt more like survival.”
‘When we began dating, I wasn’t allowed to tell my grandparents. ‘They are wholly against interracial dating,’ I was warned. We found ourselves without friends, but we persisted.’
“Growing up, I remember hearing family members make racist jokes. ‘They don’t belong here,’ they said. I never once cared about the color of skin. What mattered to me was who he was as a person. I thought others would think the same.”
3-year-old tearfully clutches her ‘Daddy Doll,’ asks mom ‘why did he have to leave?’
“Never could I have prepared myself for explaining to her it is okay to be sad, it is okay to cry and to be mad. And it is okay that your heart hurts.”
‘I’ll never forget that first homecoming’: Military dad breaks down in touching photos capturing father-daughter bond before she goes to college
“Some nights sleeping is hard. I think a lot about the past 17 years and how quickly they have gone. Shelby was born just prior to the 9/11 attacks. I was off training and then deployed to Iraq.”