We listened to the rap guy right up until we dropped Kelsey off at Subway. I waved and smiled as she shut the car door. Then  I pulled away from the curb and snapped off that garbage. Crimeny.

Pete took the silence as an invitation to pipe up from the backseat. "Petah's Daddy. Go. Now." 

I explained that Daddy was with the ship in New Orleans, that he couldn't come home. "But he loves you on the phone," I wheedled. "We can call him on the phone."

"No phone! Petah's Daddy come home now."

I just shook my head. “No get daddy, Pete. Daddy on the PHONE.”  

“No PHONE! Airport!” That’s when the screaming started. I think it was him.  It might have been me. Because sometimes this living apart thing bites a huge hole in my happiness. And it shouldn’t. It ain’t like my husband is on the ground in Iraq. We do see him sometimes. We can talk to him on the phone. Pete does not realize what a privilege this is.

So I let him cry. I punched the radio back on only to hear yet another rap song.  I found out later that the track was Fort Minor’s “Where’d You Go.” The rapper is Mike Shinoda from the mega-selling rap-rock band Linkin Park, recording on his own. I had heard the before, a rap metal song that was No.16 on the Billboard Hot 100 last week. It’s been as high as No. 4. It’s a song with a lot of cussing blipped out for video. The kind I can’t and don’t listen to.

But I left the radio on. There was something about the plaintive voice in the background that pulled me into the lyrics.

“Where'd you go?
I miss you so,
Seems like it's been forever,
That you've been gone.”

Pete stopped crying and we both listened to the purity of that voice. The sheer longing. And that sounded like us. Sounded like anybody who spends a lot of time separated from the person who loves them.

But in the middle of the girl’s song, the rapper starts up. He’s not plaintive, not sad. The person left at home sounds nothing short of livid.

"I'm stuck here waitin', at times debatin',
Tellin' you that I've had it with you and your career,
Me and the rest of the family here singing "Where'd you go?"

That voice was every bit as angry as the other was poignant. It was enough to make me want to nominate that tune as the official anthem of military spouses everywhere. It seemed to me that the song built a picture of what military life really is like for families — that purity of love and longing mixed with a healthy dose of anger and annoyance at a career that requires such single-mindedness.

Which seems a little abrasive, I know. We spouses are allowed to be sad, heavens, we are allowed to be depressed and anxious and worried and tired and proud. We’re always proud. We just aren’t supposed to be mad about the career.  It isn’t patriotic. That doesn’t stop anyone from being mad, of course, it just makes it a whole lot less social acceptable. 

Truly, I don’t know if I really want that song as an anthem. I sure wouldn’t want it as a ringtone. But I’m adding it to my playlist.  “Where’d You Go” tells a part of our military life together, too. I’ll just mix it  right in there with Richard Marks’s  “Waiting for You.” Martina McBride’s “My Baby Loves Me.”  Heatwave’s “Always and Forever.” Climax’s “Precious and Few.”

Because there is always one more way to sing this song — as long as you keep on singing it.

Hear “Where’d You Go” and see the video at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-24143734-videos--Fort-Minor
 

Or at:  http://www.ugo.com/channels/music/video/player.asp?articleID=18074