This article first appeared in the Stars and Stripes Europe edition, May 12, 2002. It is republished unedited in its original form.

EAGLE BASE, Bosnia and Herzegovina — In thousands of homes, something will be missing this Mother’s Day.

Mom.

Servicemembers are deployed to all parts of the globe, from Afghanistan and the Philippines to the Balkans and the Middle East — and points in between.

Despite the miles, the bond persists between mother and child. Mom is gone, but not forgotten. The children are not with her, but they are near.

In Bosnia, as in other places, servicemembers who are also mothers will be coping as well as they can on Mother’s Day.

Staff Sgt. Tereasa Menke, division supply sergeant for Task Force Eagle, is missing Sterling, 13, and Meggin, 16, her stepson and stepdaughter, as well as her two daughters, Rachyl, 7, and Kaylah, 3.

“It’s hard,” Menke said. “My husband sent me a videotape, and I sit in my room and watch it. I watch it just to see the faces.

“Over and over and over.”

The video helps when she’s lonely. It especially helps when the distance between her and her kids — back in Hawaii with her husband, Ed, and his parents — seems too great to handle, and the end of her deployment in four months seems like a vague promise rather than an eventual reality.

“Daddy tells them I’m at work,” she said.

Her office is decorated with pictures of the children and with drawings and paintings done by the youngest. That helps.

So do the telephone calls. But sometimes even they hurt.

“My 3-year-old says, ‘Mommy, you’ve been in Bosnia all night. Come home,’ ” she said.

She is in Bosnia, she said, because of her children. She’s away from them for their benefit.

“I’ve had a lot of challenges in the Army,” she said. “There are days you want to give up and quit. But my kids are why I’m doing what I’m doing. It’s rewarding to know that my kids can depend on me.”

Sgt. Michelle Flores misses Emilio, her 14-month-old son living with his grandparents in California.

“I write him letters every day. I know he can’t read them, but his grandparents read them to him,” she said. “And I send him stuffed animals whenever I can.”

Someday, she hopes, Emilio will read the letters himself and know his mother loved him, even when she was far away.

Flores, the flight operations noncommissioned officer for 1st Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment, was away from her son for one month last fall when she had to attend training.

“When I came back, he had already grown so big. He had changed so much,” she said.

She hasn’t seen him now since just after Christmas and is still four months from the end of this deployment. She treasures a picture of him on his first birthday, which she missed, that has been made into a puzzle.

“It’s pretty hard not being able to be there for him,” she said. “I try to focus on other things while I’m here.”

The job of tracking helicopter flights around Bosnia keeps her busy. So does the gym, which she visits as often as possible.

“If it wasn’t for that, I’d probably go insane,” she said.

At the end of each day back home in Augusta, Ga., Zachary Spielmann, 3, and his 6-year-old brother Tyler put a big X on the calendar. That’s one day closer to Mommy’s return.

Mom is Maj. Sara Spielmann, dietitian and deputy commander of administration for the Task Force Eagle hospital at Eagle Base.

“My youngest one thinks I’m coming home every day,” she said.

She’ll miss Zachary’s first day of school. She’ll miss Tyler’s T-ball season.

“They’re changing. And you can’t get that back,” she said. “You can’t replace that six months.”

Spielmann has pictures taped to her computer. Her computer screen saver is a photo of the two boys. She treasures every letter and every crayon drawing that comes in the mail.

Her husband, Dave, quit his job to stay home and take care of the kids, getting them to school, fixing meals.

“My husband is doing a wonderful job,” she said. “It puts me at ease a lot knowing he’s there. He’s very positive on the other end.”

She talks to her family on the telephone three times a week, at least, letting them hear her voice. She sends letters each week, separate mailings to Zachary and Tyler so each can have something to open, something special of their own from their mother.

Spielmann is glad her job eats up the time. On a rare off day, she took part in a 30-kilometer march across the Bosnian countryside. One day closer.

“Being busy is a big part of making time go by,” she said.

Maj. Lindy Stuart, joint military affairs projects officer for Task Force Eagle, is a long way from her sons, 3-year-old Jared, 2-year-old Jackson and Aaron, 7 months. They are in Hawaii with their father, Robin, an Army major, and his parents.

“It’s very hard. I have my pictures around all the time,” she said. “Just being able to see them kind of helps.

“I call home as frequently as I can. I talk to the two older boys. It’s almost tearful because my oldest boy asks me the same question all the time. ‘Mommy, when are you going to come home?’ ”

She took advantage of a video telephone hookup recently.

“It was the neatest thing,” she said. “We had to coordinate around nap times. The baby, I watched him crawl across the floor. That was the first time I saw that. I’m going to try to do that every month.

“He’ll probably be walking before I get home.”

Stuart will probably miss all three of the boys’ birthdays this year.

With children so young, there was no way to explain why their mother was going away. She and her husband didn’t hide it from the boys, but they didn’t try to make them understand what was happening, either.

“They just know Momma’s gone,” she said. “They know Momma’s in Bosnia, but they don’t know what that means.”

Sgt. Taheerah Armour, a military police investigator for the 549th Military Police Company, was separated from her oldest daughter a few years ago when she deployed to Germany. She was gone two years and able to visit Tanzinia, now 6, only three times.

“It was hard. It was really, really hard,” she said.

At the time, she was going through a divorce and couldn’t afford being in Germany as a single mother.

Now she has another child, Shakayla, 2, and she’s away for this six-month deployment.

“It’s still hard,” she said.

The children are at Fort Stewart, Ga., with her husband, Staff Sgt. Kassiem Armour.

“You can call and write and send a lot of pictures, but … ” she said, her voice trailing off.

She recently made a video telephone call from the base. But that may have been more trouble than benefit.

“[Shakayla] cried the whole time. She wanted to touch me,” Armour said. “She cried, so I started crying. It helped because I wanted to see how big she’s gotten since I left. But it hurts. It hurts a lot. The rest of the day I cried. They said I could do it [the video call] again, but I probably won’t.”

It was hard, too, telling the oldest about the deployment before it began.

“I let her know I love her very much,” Armour said. “I tried to let her know I didn’t leave because she was a bad kid. I left her so I can provide for her.”

Armour intends to make herself scarce on Mother’s Day.

“I’m definitely going to be on the phone,” she said. “For the most part, I’ll just be hiding because I’ll be depressed.”