June 05, 2009 
By Jacey Eckhart
After eight years of war, the hurrying passengers in Savannah airport must have been used to this scene. I was. A military mom chased a toddler in a purple shirt. A preschooler with tight blonde curls zoomed around with a Welcome Home Daddy sign that he had scribbled all over.
It was something about his sister stopped me in my tracks. She looked like every other ten year old in the country. One of those ruffly peasant shirts. Fresh jeans. Bright white sneakers pressed together in the spot where her mom told her to stand.
And such a look of expectation on her face. A look worn only by those of us who have truly missed someone. Longed for them. Cried over them at night when no one was listening. The girl leaned forward at the waist and bounced on her toes as if the gravitational pull of her body could bring her daddy sooner.
I paused to talk to the mom. “Where is your husband coming home from?”
“Just Arizona,” she said, knowing strangers like me probably expected her to say Iraq or Afghanistan. “Just training.”
I took their picture for them. What military spouse has a picture of herself on Homecoming Day? I know I don’t. But as I took the picture, I couldn’t help but think about that one word “just.” As in, “just” in Arizona and “just” in training.
I don’t think there is any such thing as “just” in military life, do you? If a service member’s absence was long enough to cause signs to be made or to cause a ten year old to cry with happiness in her daddy’s arms, I’m thinking there is no “just.”
That young mom had played the moment exactly right. Every time our service members leave us, every time they come home, it counts. She knew it. Her kids knew it. Her service member couldn’t help but know it—and I envied him. We all need that feeling.
We all need to have someone nice to come home to. Maybe even more than we think we do.
Recently I picked up Ilene Philipson’s Married To The Job: Why We Live To Work and What We Can Do About It. Philipson is a sociologist and psychotherapist who observed in her practice a national change in the way we feel about life at home. She writes, “As more of us work and work longer hours, and as technology increasingly saturates our home lives, fragmentation and isolation can make home a pretty empty place.”
It’s the kind of thing that makes people all over the country linger at work, brood over work concerns at home, text work friends while in the same house with family. And family members don’t care because they are busy with Netflix or Hulu or Facebook. Philipson calls the phenomenon “less to come home to/less to go out for.”
I can see what she means, especially when it comes to our service members. At work, our guys feel needed, trained, praised, involved, intrigued, energized, proficient. They may feel frustrated and bored a lot of the time, too, but they are undeniably necessary. At home, the necessity of their presence is less evident. After all, they think we spouses are rock stars, able to hold down a job and three kids and get the oil changed on time, no problemo.
It is easy for them to think that the military needs them more than we do. That just isn’t so, granted, but our service members aren’t home in the moments we long for them most. They can’t really know the way that we at home know.
That’s why I think homecoming rituals are so much more important for military families than for anyone else in the country. They help us express the meaning that gets lost as soon as the dishwasher needs emptying and the preschooler spills Duplos all over the living room floor and kicks them under the couch. The presence and absence of our service members define family life profoundly. So Welcome Home Daddy. Welcome Home Mommy. We just can’t do without you.