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Sunday, May 9, 2004
Little girls think of mom far away on Mother's Day
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STANDISH — Teeth brushed, pajamas on, the nightly ritual begins. The two girls gather around the small tape recorder. They rest their heads on the black machine as their mother's voice softly sings to them: "Hush little baby, don't say a word. Momma's going to buy you a mockingbird. If that mockingbird don't sing, Momma's going to buy you a diamond ring. . . ." Emily Wilkinson kisses the recorder. "Mommy," the 2-year-old says affectionately, as if her mother had walked in the room. "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine," her mother croons. "You'll never know how much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away." Emily's 4-year-old sister, Olivia, hums along with her mother. "I love you, Olivia," Alicia Wilkinson's recorded voice tells her daughters. "I love you, Emily." The tape ends and the girls kiss the recorder again. Olivia tells her mother: "Good night, Mommy." Olivia and Emily take comfort in the "Mommy tape" and hearing their mother's voice each night before they go to bed. Both their mother, Sgt. 1st Class Alicia Wilkinson, and their father, Sgt. Major David Wilkinson, were called to serve in Iraq with the Maine Army National Guard's 133rd Engineer Battalion. Their parents left on a January morning, explaining to the girls they had "special jobs to do." Olivia and Emily know their mommy and daddy are far away working. They know they're in a place called Iraq but they don't understand much more than that. Sometimes, Olivia sternly tells her mother and father when they call: "You come home right now!" After her parents first left, Emily often asked her aunt and uncle, who now care for her: "Where's Mommy? Where's Daddy?" The girls understand that their parents have been gone for Easter and Mommy's February birthday. They're told their mom and dad will be gone through the summer and Christmas. They know that Mommy won't be with them today for Mother's Day. More than 6,000 miles away in a dusty northern Iraq city called Mosul, Alicia Wilkinson also notes each holiday, each birthday she is absent from her daughters. She painfully counts the milestones she'll miss - Olivia's first day of kindergarten, Emily's discovery of new words to speak. She knows they'll grow taller while she's gone. Their faces will change and their memories of Mommy will fade. "A year is a long time to be gone," Wilkinson writes in an e-mail from Iraq, "and I can only pray that they still love me when I get home." Wilkinson worries too about how her absence will affect them. She is aware of the damage that can be done when a 4-year-old girl temporarily loses her mother. Alicia Wilkinson has been through this before. Fourteen years ago, she was called to serve in Operation Desert Storm for Maine's National Guard. At the time, her eldest daughter, Jessica, was 4 years old. "Jessica had a very hard time with me being gone for six months," Wilkinson says. "I can't even imagine what this is going to do to Olivia and Emily when I'm away a year." Jessica Richardson has a pretty good idea of what her little stepsisters are going through. Though 14 years have passed, Jessica remembers the hurt and sadness that shrouded her like a dark cloud while her mother was gone. For months, Jessica had bad dreams. Often she woke up screaming and her aunt, her mother's older sister, rocked her back to sleep. In her mind's eye, Jessica can still can see her mother at the airport the day she returned from Saudi Arabia. Wilkinson ran through the crowds to the little girl in the flowered dress and white Easter bonnet. "I held her tight," Jessica says, "never wanting to let her go again." For months after her mother returned, Jessica didn't want her mom to leave home without her. "Where are you going? When are you coming home?" she'd ask. She wanted to be with her mother every waking minute, sleep with her, hold her. Last fall, the Desert Storm memories came rushing back to her when her mother explained: "They're going to deploy me again." "How can they do that?" Jessica angrily asked. "How can they take you again? What do they do, take your mother away when your daughter turns 4?" Now nearly 18 and out on her own, Jessica thinks of her mother each night, telling her: "Keep safe. Please be careful." And she has promised to help her younger sisters get through the long months ahead. She talks to Olivia, reassuring: "You know they're going to be OK. They miss you and love you. They didn't want to go. But they had to." Soon after their mother left, Olivia asked Jessica: "Why did they have to leave me? Does my mom love me anymore? Did I do something bad?" Olivia's questions stirred Jessica's own feelings of fear and loss. "Mommy had to leave when I was 4, too," Jessica told her younger sister. "I was really worried about her but she came back. She didn't leave because you did anything wrong. It was because of her job. Mommy will always love you."
Her strawberry blond hair bouncing on her back, Emily runs from her bedroom to the hallway. There she points to a collage of pictures and maps on the wall. A photograph of her mother and father, smiling, their heads tilted together, is taped to Iraq. "Mommy, Mommy. Daddy, Daddy," Emily says, her voice rising as she looks at their faces. Above her parents' picture hangs a map of Maine. A photo of Emily and her sister Olivia is taped there. Emily pulls the picture of her mom and dad off the Iraq map and kisses both faces, with a loud smack. "Mommy. Daddy," she says, her voice a whisper. Each night both she and Olivia take the picture down. "We give them a good-night kiss," Olivia says. Above the maps are more photos of their parents, dressed in their desert camouflage uniforms. They stand together in the desert sand outside their Iraq barracks. Another picture shows Alicia in front of a green locker. Her lips are pressed tightly together, arms stiffly by her sides. Last fall, soon after they learned they would be leaving for Iraq, the Wilkinsons moved their daughters into their newly built home in Standish. Alicia's younger sister and her brother-in-law, Theresa and Peter Shaw, also moved in with the family then, hoping their presence would make it easier when they began caring for the girls in January. Still the girls didn't understand why Mommy and Daddy had to go away. Soon after they left, Olivia often asked her aunt and uncle: "When are they coming home? Why aren't they coming home?" Now, four months later, Olivia rarely asks those questions anymore. Sometimes the 4-year-old dreams about her mom and dad. But she won't talk about it. "I can't tell you what it was about because it was way too bad," she tells her aunt, Theresa Shaw. When her parents call each week, Olivia tells them: "I love Mommy and Daddy. Come home." "They blow kisses to me," she says. "I blow kisses back." Weekly and often daily, Olivia and her younger sister make crayon drawings, sketches of their hands, stenciled hearts to send to Mom and Dad. For their mother's 39th birthday in February, they videotaped their celebration. They blew up balloons, wore party hats and sang "Happy Birthday to You, Dear Mommy" around candles lit on a chocolate cake. When her daughters' gifts, videos and cards arrive at Camp Marez in Mosul, they bring Alicia Wilkinson both smiles and tears. "Yes, they make me cry," Wilkinson writes, "but that's OK, it allows me to remember that I do have feelings. My way of dealing with being here is to shut my emotions off, and not try and feel anything. It's easier that way." When the separation from her girls overwhelms her, Wilkinson relives memories of Jessica running toward her as she stepped off the plane from Desert Storm. She thinks of singing to Olivia when she was a baby, rocking her to sleep as "she looked up at me and smiled." She laughs remembering Emily tagging behind her as she cleaned the house, "wanting to help Mommy." While she savors these moments, she wonders too: "What will it be like when I come home? Will they somehow forgive me for being away?" Wilkinson's job with the 133rd Engineer Battalion is to schedule operations for the troops. She has not yet had to leave the camp and she prays she won't have to. She knows that leaving the base can cost a soldier his life. She had worked briefly with Spc. Christopher Gelineau, the 23-year-old Maine soldier who died last month during an attack on one of the 133rd's convoy missions. The death of the young soldier angered and frightened Wilkinson. She fears more now for her own safety and that of her husband, who regularly leaves camp to inspect buildings constructed by the 133rd. "I have terrible thoughts and dreams of the what-ifs, what if something happens to one of us," she says. Gelineau's death also prompted Wilkinson to think more about what she is missing, tucking her girls into bed, singing them lullabies, watching them grow. "I just really want to hug and hold them," she says. "I miss them terribly right now and sometimes I'm not sure how I'm going to make it through another 10 months without a little breakdown."
Pink butterfly clips decorate their hair, pastel dresses twirl around their legs as Olivia and Emily make a movie for Mommy. Country singer Shania Twain's voice fills the room. Olivia positions herself in front of a window. Her dark hair swings as she sashays, her lips singing: "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!," one of Olivia's favorite songs. Emily sits on a nearby couch, kicking the rug with her toe, watching the older sister she calls "Yaya" perform. "The best thing about being a woman is the prerogative to have a little fun," Olivia sings, grinning for the camera. "Oh, oh, oh . . . Man, I feel like a woman." The song ends and Olivia tells her mom: "Happy Mother's Day, Mommy." Later the girls sit at the dining room table, picking silk flowers to place in the boxes and clay pots they painted for Mommy. Emily knows the presents are special; "Mommy," she says, coloring her pot with purple marker. Olivia knows that her mom will say the video is "awesome" and the painted boxes "are pretty." Today on Mother's Day, Alicia Wilkinson will count the minutes until 4 p.m. Iraqi time, when she can call her three girls, to hear their voices and tell them she loves them. It will be morning at theirall three girls live there? Standish home, where her daughters will wait for the phone to ring. Jessica isn't sure what she'll say to her mother but she is excited "just to hear her voice." Emily won't say much more than "Mommy" and Olivia will likely tell her mother: "I love you, Mommy. I miss you. Come home." At the end of the day, teeth brushed, pajamas on, the younger girls will lie on their parents' bed and listen again to the "Mommy tape." They will press their round cheeks to the tape recorder, kissing the machine as they listen to Mommy sing: "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You'll never know how much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away." The girls will fall quiet, waiting for the words they know by heart: "Go to sleep. Go to sleep, my little girls. Lullaby and good night. Sleep tight, my little babies." Staff Writer Barbara Walsh can be contacted at 791-6382 or at:
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