My future son

The past is ever present on days like today, as we pause to remember those fallen service members.  Tonight I also saw a flash into the future.  My oldest son is 20 months old and he was out helping his daddy in the garage work on the blazer he drove to high school. 

As he was standing up behind the steering wheel, he reached out and asked for the football that was sitting on the floor in the garage.  I handed it to him and he took it and put it on the dash of the blazer.  I had just been talking to my husband about talking the blazer out and getting some pictures of our boys and him before he deploys and that had given me an idea.  One of the pictures I want to take is my oldest standing next to the blazer holding a football, then down the road when he is in high school if he ends up playing football, I want to do the same picture. 

I came inside and began thinking more about this flash forward.  I told my mom about it and she said the same had happened from time to time when my sister and I were growing up.  She talked about how it pulls at the heartstrings... and it does.  For a moment, my heart ached as I knew my boys are already growing up too fast. 

Then I thought further about it...  one of the things that has always been in the back of my mind with my boys growing up around the military is the possibility of them taking that route and how much that scares me.  But it was a fear that both my family and my husband's family faced a number of years back when we had each enlisted and again faced each time we deployed. 

I began to imagine the mothers of the fallen...  how they had felt when they were watching their children grow up, whether they saw them growing old or having children, or whether they had pictured them in uniform.  When I have talked to Gold Star Mothers in the past, some mentioned that being in the service was all their child ever wanted, others said it was something they never expected.  When you talk to most of them, their favorite stories they share are the ones of their young child, when innocence was at it's best and the simple things in life were the best. 

Before I became a mommy, I still couldn't imagine losing a child to a war.  Now that I am a mommy to two amazing boys, I can't imagine losing my children to anything.  Today, after this vision of my future son, my heart aches more than it normally does for those mothers who have lost their child.