Spring leaned toward summer, 2022. I basked in the kitchen’s sun and unloaded the dishwasher when my 15-year-

old daughter, Keira, materialized behind a cupboard door.

“I need to talk to you about something I discussed with my therapist,” she said.

A cannonball dropped in my stomach. Two days prior, she’d lounged so long in the bath behind a locked door. In

the silence of that hour, I thought about razorblades for shaving, that a person could drown in three inches of water, how I hadn’t been as warm and motherly as I could have been that morning before she left for school…was she having suicidal ideations?

“Yes, baby. I’m here. What is it?” My voice sounded steadier than I felt. Good.

She rolled up her shirt sleeve and held her inner forearm out to me. Six thin, pale lines laddered up her soft skin.

The lines each extended an inch and a half, spaced in one-inch intervals. Scars, yes, but not red, not deep, not infected, not angry.

“I did this,” she said, simply.

“You cut your arm?”

“Yes. Back when Daddy was watching my grades.”

“Oh, my baby,” I whispered, a plate in each hand. It was all I could manage.

As my wet eyes searched her face, then her arm again, she explained, “I was so ashamed about my grades that I

couldn’t force myself do schoolwork. I felt pain, but it was all in my head. I think I needed to feel real pain.” She spoke calmly. The emotion that inspired her self-harm had passed. The scars were straight and well-healed—her intent was not to take her life. I sensed no present danger.

#

They say military children are like dandelions. They can put down roots and adapt easily; they survive almost

anywhere. They are impossible to destroy. Military children bloom everywhere the wind carries them—ever ready for new adventures, new lands, and new friends.

Yet, to kill a dandelion one rips out its roots.

#

For many years, I prayed, Please let me not send my kids into therapy the way my parents did to me. So many of my

friends’ and family members’ kids were medicated for either behavioral or mental health reasons. I swore that would never be my children. Mine would not need therapy or meds; if they did, I decided, I’d have failed as a mother. Our culture suggested that to be perfect was my job, as a mother—and I never fail. So, I’d do whatever it took. I believed that by working tirelessly on myself and my marriage, I could create a household free of toxicity on behalf of my children. Further, I believed, because the military community told me so, that a stable home environment would make up for the transience of my children’s outer world.

Looking back now, I see my children’s outer world was exceptionally transient. Both were born in Abilene, Texas in

2006 and 2007. From there, we moved seven times in 14 years: Prattville, AL (2009); Springfield, VA (2011); Abilene, TX (2013); Springfield, VA (2016); Madrid, Spain (2017); Minot, ND (2019); Albuquerque, NM (2021). By the time my daughter showed me her arm, she’d lived in eight different homes. And we’d been lucky—many military children are moved more often than this.

My resolve to provide the perfect household environment and counterbalance the drawbacks of our lifestyle lasted

until each of my children reached age ten. In 2011, when my eldest, Keira, entered fifth grade in Sangster Elementary’s Advanced Academics program and we worked late into the evenings together on algebra problems to skip her a year ahead in math, we persisted—I persisted—with a faith rooted in my little dandelion: she would thrive. I knew her resistance to my pressure to drive her forward would dissolve as she witnessed her success. We just needed to survive that year. We couldn’t know that within ten months we’d be packing to move to Madrid, that all our extra hours of home tutoring for her success in the Fairfax County Public School system would matter little in the International College of Spain’s International Baccalaureate program. I could not see then that the stress of skipping a year in math in fifth grade would fuel Keira’s anxiety about grades for the rest of her academic career.

#

Moving into housing on Dyess Air Force Base in 2013 was the closest our family ever got to moving home. We’d

been allocated a house that backed up to the neighborhood playground. My children’s long-time best friends from prior assignments already occupied two houses on the other side of the playground. Keira was entering second grade and my son first. Those first few weeks, my husband worked, and the kids went to friends’ homes to play while I unpacked the house. The kids were gone for hours at a time, often over mealtimes, yet they were always supervised. The military community is like this. Best military friends know we are permitted (or expected) to treat every child like our own, to dole out love, even in the form of discipline, when needed. This is not exactly what people mean when they say, “It takes a village,” yet it was our village. 

That west Texas desert became our Eden; we put down roots despite packed clay soil. For three years, friends moved

in, friends moved out, some even outlasted us—our family metamorphosed, but it was consistently family. Children traipsed through our kitchen, living room, backyard, created clubs in our trees, threw up from spinning too fast on our swing, ate our Halos, drank our Capri Suns, sliced their shins on our firepit, flooded fire ant mounds with our hose. Bounce houses, game nights, movie nights, block parties, pool parties. If one friend was sick or traveling, another was available; my kids were never alone. Inside this culture, I agree that my children bloomed like dandelions. At Dyess, my children had a community, and it was breathtaking to watch them thrive.

#

In the past, I’ve often told my own mother why I was making parenting decisions differently from those she made

when I was a child. She invariably responded, “Well we didn’t do it that way, and you turned out just fine.” Did I, though? My four therapists over the past twenty years might disagree. I moved multiple times during childhood too—although not as many times as my children—and recall the difficulty of those transitions. But mine was a single mother who worked full-time at the CIA, and I found her parenting style hard, rigid, authoritarian, and cold; I would never have turned to her with my feelings. Because my sister and I were co-opted into vying against one another for mom’s favor, I couldn’t turn to my sister for connection, either. She was my nemesis. Whenever I shared my thoughts or feelings within our little home of three, I felt chided, punished, or silenced; I learned it was safest not to share. Thus, I turned inward, read books, imagined worlds.

I recall as a high-schooler mom making me promise that if I were to ever “get in trouble,” I would come to her. Tell

her. That she’d protect me. I didn’t know what mom’s protection under such circumstances might look like, considering how I felt in her presence even when I was a good girl (top grades, no drugs, no sex, no alcohol). So instead of this promise making me feel more connected to my mom, I shut down toward her and hid my faults and errors.

When my children are older, when they are parenting their own offspring, as medicine, science, and culture evolve,

they will know more about the health of their children than I do mine right now. Hopefully, they will make different choices than mine, and I will remember to say, “I am sorry for the ways that my parenting hurt you; if I’d known better, I would have done better. I am glad you are striving for better.” We can only parent effectively to the degree which we are healed.

As it is, although I wish I could give my kids the healthiest upbringing possible, I already see where our military

lifestyle has created fissures in their mental wellbeing. Would it have benefited them more to stay in one place? Their exposure to the world via our transient lifestyle has opened their minds to travel, culture, food, people, and languages. I want to reassure myself that the benefits of this lifestyle outweigh the costs, but I can’t be so sure. Then, I speculate about my own upbringing, about how I did not have someone to turn to during times of uncertainty. Yet Keira turned to me. I want her to continue turning to me.

#

The outside world is more resistant to dandelions: often overlooked despite their resilience, beauty, nutritional and

health benefits, they are perceived as a weed, an interloper amongst an established garden’s homogeneity. When we were stationed in Spain in 2017, the pre-teens in Madrid’s suburban neighborhood call my kids “peasants”—pointedly, in English. I suspect they used the word because, unlike the other homes in our urbanización, we had no chica de la casa in nursing scrubs to carry our trash to the dumpster. Nobody but me to walk the dog. No Porsche Cayenne or Maserati Levante—just two ancient, sunbaked and dented BMW 3-series sedans. My children incessantly described their classmates’ clothing as double name branded: Gucci on Versace on Fendi. Did their own Gap, Old Navy, and Target wardrobes isolate them? Were they yellow weeds among Madrid’s most fragrant: jasmine, bougainvillea, wisteria? They made no friends in our neighborhood those two years and only a few friends at school. They struggled with identity and friendship in Madrid for two years, and then we moved again—to Minot, ND.

#

April is the Month of the Military Child. We celebrate them for a month. We host or attend parties in their name.

We wear purple. We compare them to dandelions. We talk about their resilience. We tell them that they’re special, but does this month counterbalance the heft of friendships extinguished prematurely? Does it create a bigger window in my son’s new, smaller, darker bedroom to make it more resemble the last? Can it relocate my children to within driving distance of their grandfather dying of terminal brain cancer? What is a month? One intangible to replace countless others. Upon what scale do we weigh these exchanges?

“You knew what you were signing up for,” some have said to me about my life choices—about marrying a pilot who

would frequently deploy, leaving me alone in remote locations, and who would repeatedly displace me, us, all of us. Maybe they’re not wrong, except I couldn’t have envisioned most of this at 21, when I said, “I do.” I certainly never foresaw mothering two babies under two alone while all three of us suffered from a 24-hour stomach flu. And I can’t imagine a world without this man, these children, this lifestyle. I do love it, mostly—the anticipation of each new transition, the adventure, our family’s intimacy.

Perhaps it would have been different if it had been just my husband and me, forever. Or maybe there’s something

more to that, but that’s a different story.

It's my children, now, I think about. My children didn’t choose this lifestyle, and it might not suit them. I chose it

for me; the impact it would have on my children wasn’t a thought that crossed my mind when the hormones of my mid-twenties coursed through my veins, prodding me to start a family.

Keira’s scars flash red and white in my mind and the former me, the perfectionist wife and mother, wants to know if

there was any way I could’ve prevented this. What could I have done? But I can’t change the past; so today I want to do more than pontificate about my daughter’s resilience—I want to help her cultivate it.

#

While Minot, ND, winters were cold and dark, and most kids struggled to stay on top of their virtual schoolwork

during COVID shutdowns, Keira thrived. Not only did the lax online instruction work better for her nonstandard learning style, but North Dakota offered a choice at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year: students could learn from home, or they could attend in-person with masks. It was her freshman year of high school, and Keira chose to go back to school in-person. With others learning from home, the in-person pace slowed, and classroom student-to-instructor ratios improved. Keira got straight-As.

That summer, our two years in Minot expired, and my husband was transferred to Kirtland Air Force Base, in

Albuquerque, NM. Our family’s transition to Kirtland went well for my youngest, but this was the first time I noticed Keira rattled by a transition. La Cueva High is one of the top schools in New Mexico; its academics are more challenging than Minot High—and by 2021-22, the system had recovered from COVID shutdowns. The school’s vastness, bloated class sizes, and demanding bell schedule were a shock for both our children, but especially for Keira. Her grades wavered, then plummeted, as she found herself unable to complete or turn in even minor assignments. Her bedroom, unswervingly disorganized since she was a toddler, became a war zone of damp towels, dirty clothes, clean clothes, dishes, filth, trash. Her bed was never made, the sheets never changed.

As parents, what did we do? The first thing a parent thinks to do: we admonished her. We attributed her disarray to

lack of motivation. Laziness. To not caring enough. My husband monitored her assignments via ParentVue—he knew every time a grade shifted, anytime she forgot to turn something in, whenever she bombed an exam. We punished her, thinking she just needed the right incentive, some tough love, and her grades slipped further beyond reach. She descended into paralysis. There was too much to do to recover her grades; overwhelmed, she could not begin to try. We were bereft. We knew this girl. She was so bright, so full of potential! Just think of that time she skipped a grade in math! Yet we could not coerce her to produce.

Something had to give, but we didn’t know what. Then, one day, Keira said what we all needed to hear: “Mom, I

need help.” I resisted at first. What would help look like? Who did I need to call to make this happen? Where could I turn? I emailed the school counselor on Keira’s behalf and scheduled a consultation. Soon, Keira booked weekly Zoom sessions with a clinical psychologist assigned to the school district (did you know that’s a thing?). We paid nothing, our insurance was billed nothing, because this is a service provided by the state for students in need. Keira attended Zoom therapy sessions until the school years’ end.

The next day, I unpacked all this to my therapist in a flood of emotion during my own session. She told me that

Keira’s challenges sounded symptomatic of ADHD, and in my head, cogs slid into place. I went home and frantically researched ADHD: websites, books, podcasts. I landed on Gabor Maté and immediately purchased his book, Scattered Minds. ADHD sounded like my daughter in every way. We are now hoop-jumping with Keira’s PCM and Tricare to get her an official evaluation, then perhaps a diagnosis and an IEP. Keira sees my therapist weekly now, too.

Maté reports that ADHD is indicative of early childhood trauma, and I think back and wonder, how long Keira has

struggled with this and masked her symptoms? Did it start all the way back with her traumatic birth, or the fact that we moved with her across country when she was only two weeks old—I was stressed, she wouldn’t latch, so she was stressed? Or was it in second grade at Dyess Elementary in Abilene when she had a rigid, demanding, unbending teacher who revoked Keira’s recess daily for missed assignments? Did it have roots in those long, tense evenings of fifth grade at Sangster Elementary, as we pressed her (in retrospect, too hard) to skip a grade in math? Was it the strain of switching to the International Baccalaureate curriculum and then back again? I wonder, if we’d moved her less, traumatized her less, might we have identified these symptoms earlier or avoided it altogether?

#

Part of me wants to reject the dandelion metaphor for my children, as an act of defiance. But then, I consider how I

feel about artificially and meticulously manicured, landscaped yards…and I think I’d prefer to embrace it.

In our need to control our environments, we manage our spaces. We buy homes and lay down yards. As for a lawn,

we install either whatever grass is cheap or easy to maintain or maybe whatever’s handsomest. Some strive for the golf course appeal: a status symbol yard. But these green yards devastate local ecologies. Their maintenance requires herbicide, pesticide, and frequent watering (a scarce resource). Then, such homogeneity provides no sustenance for local wildlife at any level (insects, reptiles, birds, mammals).

Last fall, between mowing cycles, the uncultivated land between Kirtland’s residential housing developments

sprouted wildflowers. One afternoon, I was struck to a standstill by the beauty of this unmanicured space. In it bloomed wheatgrass, sagebrush, redtop, cane bluestem, milkweed, buffalograss, squirreltail, fescue, saltbush, bluegrass, rabbitbrush, cottontop, red threeawn, and yes, even dandelion. Red, purple, yellow, white. The space was not only a sea of color; it was a sea of activity. Insects, as small as gnats to as large as hummingbird moths, busied themselves throughout that flowering wilderness for about two weeks. Then, Kirtland’s contracted landscapers came through with giant mowers and razed it all to the ground.

I want my dandelion children could contribute to a future landscape of that sort…wild and unconstrained, un-

razed and thriving. Moreover, I want Keira to embrace her neurodivergence, because to do so will release her of anxiety and bring her joy, and what homogeneous society thrives, anyway?

#

July 2022, after the kids’ first year in Albuquerque, our family took a two-week west coast National Parks road trip.

One night, as we lounged around our campfire at Wawona in Yosemite National Park, a man and woman in their sixties approached to sell firewood to “help offset the price of gas.” Only a third of our way through our trip, as gas prices in California approached six dollars per gallon, we got it: we bought their wood. We’d use it eventually, if not that night.

While she waited for my husband to retrieve cash from our car, the woman struck up a conversation. She asked my

daughter where she wants to go to college.

“Colorado, maybe,” Keira said.

I said, “The University of New Mexico is a great school too. Value lies in the quality of a school’s education, not its

name.” I thought about Keira’s grades for a second, then added, “I don’t want my children drowning in debt over prestige.”

 The lady’s reply was almost combative: her son went to Harvard because that’s all he’d wanted since he was four

years old. They paid full tuition for him and then did the same for his siblings who all went to UC Berkeley: “It was the least we could do when we’d stressed perfect grades their entire lives!”

My breathtaking daughter, pulling her sleeves down over her forearms and gnawed fingernails, wilted in the camp

chair next to me. We no longer blamed Keira for the Bs and Cs that comprised the entirety of her sophomore year report card, which we received in the mail the week prior. What metric of evaluation were grades when your baby was adjusting to her eighth new school—new teachers, new friends, new home, new bedroom, in a new location? We were just beginning to juggle her ADHD diagnosis and what that might mean for her future. I wished all the best for that lady with her straight-A achieving Harvard and Berkeley-educated children, but who was buying firewood from whom? I must find a different way to define my children’s success. I wanted to be proud of Keira’s report card. It showed her resilience in the face of adversity but also her precious vulnerability. I wanted my dandelion to stand strong in the face of cultural standards, not wilt.

But to do that, she must spread roots and be encouraged to grow. 

#

The advice I received as an anxious new mother from my children’s first pediatrician feels most helpful: “Just love

them,” he said, as my baby girl screamed on his knee, post-inoculation. I think I understand what he meant, now. To love them is more than feeding them the most nutritious meals, keeping an immaculate home, dressing them in couture, or ensuring they wear their seatbelts and helmets. To love them is a calling broader, even, than providing a healed, toxicity-free home, offering a village, or blindly honoring them for a month.

To love them is to acknowledge that nobody escapes childhood unscathed. It is to acknowledge that my life

decisions impacted my kids. To love them is to cultivate a safe space for my own mistakes—which in turn cultivates space for their mistakes. I want my children to continue coming to me, if they’ve drawn a razor across their skin, if they cannot maintain their grades, if they are seized by terror at night, and yes, if they “get in trouble.” I am grateful that Keira had the courage to say, “Mom, I need help.” This is where my own mother failed; it is where I want to succeed.

Thankfully, I’m not done yet. Today I will give up the idea that there is some perfect parenting toward which to

strive. I want to be more receptive and responsive to their individual needs, and I want to take a stand on their behalf. I will make phone calls if they need help beyond my capabilities. I want to escort them each into a future where they can find joy and carry over minimal anxiety from their transient upbringing.

#

Now spring leans toward summer, 2023. On our weekly date night, Brian sits across from me at a table in a corner

of Artichoke Café downtown on Central. We look at each other over a candle and empty plates while we wait for our burrata starter. I take a sip of wine, then watch cars pass outside the window.

“So…I didn’t get the job I applied for at NORTHCOM, but they offered me different job at Peterson Space Force

Base in Colorado Springs,” he says. “My boss is telling me I could get picked up for promotion next year. If I do, we’d only be in the Springs for one year.”

I look at him.

We’ve wanted to retire in Colorado since he was stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base in Rapid City, SD, before the

kids were born. Brian is a USAFA grad, and we spent many weekends road-tripping through Colorado during those first years of marriage. Plus, Keira is entering her senior year and still has her hopes set on attending CSU in Ft. Collins. If she completes her senior year in Colorado, she’ll be eligible for in-state tuition. Our son aspires to be a legacy student at USAFA. I can’t deny that relocation to the Springs is seductive.

Still, a move this summer puts Keira at risk of not graduating on-time since every state has their own unique

graduation requirements that they are loath to waive. Then, there’s her strain transitioning from Minot to Albuquerque—why do that to her again? And if we moved again the following year, both kids, somehow, would find themselves newbies their senior years, when they should be the big kids on campus.

I know our children will say they are okay with moving to Colorado Springs, but as I grow weary of transitions

myself, I am learning this: sometimes my head says one thing while my body says another. If I am being honest, our past four moves, from Abilene to Virginia to Madrid to Minot to Albuquerque, have taken a toll on my own health. I tell my husband that every new transition is fine, yet I wind up visiting doctors for symptoms like insomnia, back pain, heart palpitations, and panic attacks. My doctors look but find nothing wrong with me: it’s stress, they conclude.

And I wonder…will my kids commit to moving again, rationally, while steeling themselves against the emotional

toll one more move will take? What sort of stress will they endure, and how will that manifest? ADHD for my daughter? Anxiety for my son? The answers to these questions are finally too obvious to ignore. They want to please us by saying “yes.” But it’s my obligation to advocate for them. I must say “no.”

“You can take the job,” I tell Brian as I set down my wine. “But I’m telling you right now that if you do, you’re doing

it for the Air Force, or for yourself, and not for us. Not for this family.”

His fingers spin his Manhattan in a circle of condensation on the tablecloth. He tilts the glass and the ice clinks. 25

years; I know this transition will be just as difficult for him, if not more so, than every relocation was for our kids. He takes a deep breath.

“Okay,” he says.