Deployed: a Mother’s Day apart

This is no typical Mother’s Day for Terri Fowler.

Instead of awakening to a family breakfast and Hallmark-style greeting, she’ll eat in a dining hall filled with soldiers and visit an Internet cafe to open an e-card.

It’s the first time Fowler can recall spending Mother’s Day apart from her 18-year-old daughter.

“We have a good relationship. I’m not one of those hovering moms who demands that the day be about me,” Fowler said during a phone interview more than a week ago as she was preparing to travel from Fort Riley, in northeast Kansas, for Iraq.

Fowler is among a group of 7,243 military women who’ve left behind children and civilian lives for deployment outside the continental United States.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense, Fowler, a battalion supply sergeant first class who serves out of the Richard H. Walker U.S. Army Reserve Center in Spokane Valley, is one of 3,496 Army mothers currently deployed and one of 644 from Army Reserve units.

Like most soldiers, Fowler is missing out on once-in-a-lifetime milestones – including her daughter’s upcoming high school graduation. Unlike most soldiers, Fowler is a 46-year-old woman serving in a combat zone.

Fowler was born into military service, having been delivered at the hospital on Fairchild Air Force Base while her parents lived on base and her father, Joe Thompson, served as a flyboy. She enlisted in the Army 27 years ago. The Spokane resident is among a dozen reservists with the 104th Division (Institutional Training) who were recently called to active duty. Her unit consists of drill sergeants who teach basic training.

After a training session in California last fall, where she developed a renewed appreciation for blisters and backaches, Fowler came back to Spokane and closed out the merchandise at The Bamboo Lady, a store she owned in northwest Spokane. The shop sold bamboo plants that practitioners of Chinese feng shui believe to be lucky, along with some antiques belonging to her mother, Yvonne Thompson, owner of Monarch Estate Sales.

In January, Fowler embarked on 90 days of training before shipping out to the Middle East.

For the next year or more, the soldier will live out of four vacuum-packed duffle bags, an assault pack and a rucksack. She’ll trudge through intense heat wearing body armor, gear and weapons that weigh about 50 pounds.

For Fowler’s 18-year-old daughter, Jessica, it’s the day-to-day things the teenager misses most. As a senior at Lewis and Clark High School, she’s experiencing one event after another, culminating with graduation and a senior all-nighter.

Her father, Ron Fowler, said his daughter is a great kid who has good days and bad days worrying about the safety of her mother. It’s a concern he shares. As a parent, he has stepped up, with the primary goal of helping Jessica through graduation and on with her life. Still, the 51-year-old father said there’s a void in his girl’s life.

“It’s difficult for me, sometimes, to fill the mom’s side.”

Jessica said she’s getting support from family and friends. Still, as some teens might reluctantly admit, the same motherly nagging that drives them crazy, ultimately keeps things running smoothly.

After working a full day at Manito Country Club last Saturday, Jessica was spending some down time with a friend and almost was late for a group dinner that was a precursor to the senior prom.

“I’m kind of a procrastinator to the core. She would have been yelling, ‘Jess hurry up,’ ” the teenager said. In Iraq, Terri Fowler is responsible for training five young soldiers to do logistics. Some of the personnel she’s training are barely older than Jessica.

“I’m going to be tough on them because I think it’s important. We have to work as a team to survive,” said Fowler, adding, “I told them my job is to bring them home alive.”

After months of remaining upbeat – even as she closed the doors of her Hamilton Street store for good – the looming prospect of spending a year away from her family and friends got to her as she prepared to leave the country.

“I’m trying to pack, but it’s been very tough,” said Fowler over the phone as she tried to cram enough possessions for the next year into four duffle bags.

Optimism runs through several generations of women in the family. Fowler’s mother and daughter appreciate the commitment, while fully comprehending the risks. Still, they don’t dwell on the dark side.

“You could sit around and mope every day about it,” Thompson, 65, said, as her granddaughter finished with “but there’s no use in that.”

When Thompson sensed that her daughter was down, she reminded Fowler of camels and palaces and other interesting sights she wouldn’t otherwise see.

“It’s just kind of another adventure for her. It’s another story she can tell,” Thompson said.

The two recently got together with Fowler in Kansas City, Mo., before she left the states. There they canvassed shopping malls and “grandma” learned to text message. Text messaging, the two say, is easier than trying to schedule phone calls around a time difference of about 11 hours and is a quicker way to get reassurance that Fowler is OK.

The chronicles of this military mother serving in Iraq have arrived in the form of text messages and e-mails. When a helicopter delivered her to the Middle East, Fowler reported that it was 86 degrees at midnight as she lugged an 80-pound duffle bag and a 40-pound rucksack across the tarmac while wearing individual body armor and a helmet and toting weapons. “I was soooo dying,” she lamented.

Her first night was spent in a tent with 40 other women in cots, side-by-side. At the second stop there were 14 women per tent, and both places had latrines and showers that were about 100 yards away.

By Wednesday, Fowler was in a classroom in a compound with buildings and bunkrooms. When she arrives at her final assignment, she may get private accommodations, she said.

While she initially hoped to see a few camels, the Spokane native was treated to the sight of hundreds – all at once. The humpbacks intermittently interrupted practice range shooting for the better part of a day.

“Be careful what you wish for,” she joked in text.

Because traditional mail takes weeks to arrive in Iraq, Jessica plans to send an e-card for Mother’s Day.

Jessica will try to avoid too many news stories about casualty counts and instead focus on news about policy changes that could bring her mother, and other military men and women, home soon.

“I can’t help but worry about her. There is no avoiding worrying when someone is in a war zone,” the teenager said.

Thompson said during the upcoming year she’ll miss the backwoods morel mushroom hunts with her daughter and working estate sales together.

“We always missed her when she went for the two-week training sessions, but it was nothing like this,” Thompson said, but, “she’s doing what she has to do.”

Fowler would like to think that she’ll be home in a year but knows that some deployments don’t wrap up neatly as planned.

In her absence, a nephew will be born and birthdays of family members and friends celebrated. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas will pass. She’ll most likely usher in the New Year overseas. And Jessica will graduate.

After the big event, Jessica will head to Tennessee with some buddies for a music festival before packing her belongings to move to Charlotte, N.C. There, the teen will live with her brother, a high school teacher and coach named Jason Fowler, and his family while attending Central Piedmont Community College.

Graduation, Terri Fowler admits, will be tough to miss. Still, the Bamboo Lady considers herself lucky. One female soldier left behind four children – the youngest only a year old. As a fellow mom, she appreciates the milestones that woman will be missing.

“I think that everybody in life makes sacrifices. Women in general, I think, have it harder.”

As for Mother’s Day, the soldier said in a recent e-mail, “I’ll be working.”