Frontiersman

MAT-SU — Palmer resident Sharon McBride said goodbye to her 4-year-old daughter, Lyssa, and was off to Kuwait. That was 2 1/2 years ago.

It wasn’t the first U.S. Army deployment for Sgt. 1st Class McBride, a single parent. In the past five years, she had toured Egypt, Hurricane Katrina disaster sites and Kuwait. Before preparing to leave her daughter once more with her mother in Alaska during her most recent deployment, McBride began noticing changes in her pre-schooler’s behavior. Lyssa had begun showing signs of depression and anger, throwing temper tantrums at the drop of a hat.

“She really felt the need to smack something,” McBride said. “When I was deployed to Kuwait, Lyssa was having emotional issues with me being gone. She had begun getting into books at age 3, so I began searching around to find other ways to explain things to her. I noticed there were only military daddy books out there, so I decided to write my own.”

When McBride returned from her tour last year, she began to draft her own children’s book and titled it “My Mommy Wears Combat Boots.” It is an illustrated children’s book based on McBride’s personal experience as a soldier and a mother. It also serves as a way to explain why she needed to leave her child again and potentially be in harm’s way.

“The book explains emotions involved when a parent leaves and that it’s OK to feel things,” she said. “They are scared. The parent, who was there 24 hours a day before, now has to leave and there’s an issue of abandonment there. Kids feel all the emotions an adult does, but can’t verbalize them like an adult.”

The 12-page book is about a little girl bear cub whose mother bear is away serving as a soldier in the U.S. Army. The cub goes through all the emotions of having a parent missing from her life and tries to cope with them. When the cub is mad at her mother for being gone, Grandma helps with other ways to make her feel better. But the cub has a difficult time expressing guilt, frustration, anger, loneliness and sadness, not realizing at first that it’s normal to feel all of this and more as the result of her mother’s military deployment. In the book, the cub prays for all the other children with moms in the military serving away from home, because there are lots of mommies who wear combat boots.

“The book goes into things that we went through,” McBride said. “Grandma would help Lyssa count the days off the calendar to when I would get home and read her my e-mails. I also bought her these shoes that light up when she runs, and I asked her to think of me and I how much I love her when they glow.”

McBride said when Lyssa would get angry or frustrated she couldn’t go with her mother, she would hit or become upset. In her book, McBride’s young character is reminded that hands are not for hitting, and when a child is scared, she or he should go and find Grandma for extra hugs and kisses.

In her first draft of “My Mommy Wears Combat Boots,” McBride also created the illustrations, typed out the story-line and bound the pages herself. She soon realized that when it comes to designing and producing a children’s book, she needed all the assistance she could get.

McBride put down some money and sought the publishing services from Authorhouse, an online self-publishing company. The easy process got her book ready to sell on the market earlier this month.

Amazon.com lists one other book similar to McBride’s, “Mommy, You’re My Hero,” by Michelle Ferguson-Cohen. It is also a story for preschool children dealing with a mother’s in deployment.

To date, “My Mommy Wears Combat Boots” has sold out of its first run of 100 copies, and Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and four other online bookstores have picked up the book.

McBride said “My Mommy Wears Combat Boots” is perfect for mothers in uniform seeking a way to help explain to their children the emotions associated with deployment and ways to positively channel those emotions when they are away.

Now retired from U.S. Army service and a civilian working at Ft. Richardson in journalism and public relations, McBride said she is happy she will no longer have to leave her daughter for long periods of time.

“I had sent my daughter to live with her grandmother for the entire year I was gone,” she said. “It was hard on everyone, including my mom, who couldn’t handle the rigors of taking care of a toddler. This book might help kids deal a little better with a mom being away serving her country.”