Let this be a testament to the power of the Stepmom. Let this story flex the frayed muscles of hope and faith. Let this be proof of the unseen strings that tether us together like wild marionettes in perpetual flail. But held, somehow, in some unearthly palm.

I watched Boeings slam the World Trade Center in English class while still raw from an uprooting, a divorce, and a new woman in our lives. My parents’ split was stretched and nasty but it brought my father close to me and as we sucked ketchup packets in his new apartment I saw emotion bloom in an otherwise stone and stern soldier of the U.S. Army. Before that, he was just an absence. Morning PT and early formation, home just in time for dinner if possible, maybe a meatloaf, and weeks at a time in the “field.” He was a man of the Cav and for years split his time between a bed and a tank called Megadeth.

Through the divorce and through his masters’ course, however, he became a fixture. Kelly, his new wife and my new authority figure, was ill-prepared to inherit two shithead teenagers and thus none of her rulings were ever final until ultimately presented to my father. He was on our side. He had to be. He was the referee between Kelly, my younger sister, and I. And we fought without stopping.

And then we were in Germany. Just like that. Back in the States, you had the news. You had protests and discussions and palpable outrage but what you really had was the news and that’s how you knew a war was going on. With the service members and their brats, relocated to Europe to be closer to “the shit,” we watched. Deployment dates loomed. Each day a new friend mentioned their father or mother’s unit had rolled out. We spent so much time waiting, waiting to go, waiting to come back, waiting for calls, waiting for good news.

So the well-oiled war machine quickly shot Father Hanson to Iraq—and there we waited, holding our breath for years.

My sister and I, though happy to be on our father’s side of the split, were staunchly Anti Stepmom. Kelly had zero parenting experience, was an ex-parole officer who taught Take Back The Night courses, and let no missteps go unpunished. We were truly at odds. She signed up for loving my father and in return received his love and two kids full of steaming bullshit. Then, the one person we all had in common was removed and placed in combat.

We weren’t supposed to watch the news and they were reporting things we already knew, anyway. But that didn’t stop the mental film reel of Every War Death You Had Ever Seen In The Movies playing ad infinum. Stars & Stripes had death lists each week, and sometimes you recognized the names. Academic failings, teenage heartbreak, inter-family squabbles, newly formed existential dread, all coated with a grimy reminder that war is very real and war is coming for your father.

Meanwhile, Kelly had these same worries, multiplied exponentially I’m sure, hanging over every punishment doled out for poor grades and over every negotiation of some miniscule transaction in mangled half-German. The consequences of military involvement were already fully realized in her life—her father’s helicopter went down in Vietnam when she was a toddler.

“I hate you” was always leaving my mouth and my behavioral problems kept me confined to my bedroom. I was feeling too much, trudging through the initial stages of manic depression, trying to up my teenage punk-levels in any way possible. But we had one house rule. The rule was this: when your father calls (which, at its highest frequency, happened once a week) you speak nothing of the trivial spats of our day-to-day life. The rule made sense. He was worried about IEDs and dead friends and I was worried about staying out past ten and deleting porn from our browser history. This was never more apparent than the Mortar Call.

Over a crackling long-distance line stretching from Baghdad to Heidelberg, I was updating my father about the play I was in when I heard a large crash, like someone crunching a beer can into the receiver, and then the line went dead. The lines dropped all the time, so I tried not to panic. He called back minutes later. A mortar blew through the roof of his office. Luckily, the telephone was in the hallway and his office mate was out. That’s how close he was. That time.

So we didn’t talk, not about the important things, the big things, at least, and Kelly was seen as the Enemy and confiding in her felt like sacrilege. (She was already snooping through my emails and nailing me to the wall for my infractions, as well as trolling my Myspace page under a fake account.) So I kept a journal and a blog and wrote shitty songs and even shittier poems and snuck out to German bars whenever possible. But after a pain in my groin sent me to the hospital and the doctor worried I may have had testicular cancer, I couldn’t keep on just working these things out in my own, already cracking, mind.

I stopped believing in God the second church was no longer mandatory in my family. But faith is a different beast and all that misguided mega-church Christianity hoopla I was subjugated to did something to me. During the month of urologist visits, through all of the supremely-not-knowing-a-goddamn-thing, I’d stay up nights praying at the ceiling. Not to God, exactly, but asking the world to fix itself. So I wouldn’t die (how dramatic!). So my father wouldn’t die (not dramatic!). Just asking a Great Nothingness for everything to end up right.

Kelly drove me to a doctor’s appointment and I finally let all the horrible fear pour like bats out of my mouth. She listened, and listened well, and then talked to me like I wasn’t dumb or naïve or less than her. I realized this was a plane we could find each other on, unlike so many others, for we were both trying to make it through simple days while grappling with huge, substantiated fear. Just two scared idiots both doing things neither of them expected to have to do.

And that’s how it went on, until he came home, and then when Operation Iraqi Freedom reprised he left again. We were all waiting for the future and we were all brand new—no matter how much either of us wanted to think otherwise. We were so obviously raw and, well, real recognize real, so that’s how we made it through. Sometimes just acknowledging that someone else is fighting in the trenches with you, regardless of tactic and goals, makes all the difference. And that there is no grand award for being a military spouse is nearly criminal, because wars trickle back and shade anything good that touches them.