Kate Braestrup was stunned when her oldest son, Zach, decided near the end of high school he wanted to join the military. It was 2004, and America was embroiled in two wars. What mother would want to send her boy off to be a soldier? Especially a mother who is a Unitarian Universalist chaplain and a pacifist?
But, says Braestrup, a chaplain for the Maine Warden Service, eighteen-year-old children want what they want, so Zach headed off to Marine boot camp. “It’s like a kidnapping,” says Braestrup. “The recruiter actually comes to the house to take him away.” In her new book, Anchor & Flares: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hope, and Service (Little, Brown, July), Braestrup alternates observations about motherhood’s joys and losses with snarky episodes in which she admits it’s pretty nice to have all six kids finally grown. She remembers watching a mama squirrel push her baby from its nest and wishing transitions were that simple for human beings.
Readers might remember Zach from Braestrup’s 2007 memoir, Here If You Need Me, which was one of Time magazine’s top ten nonfiction books for 2007, had a starred review in PW, and won the Melcher Book Award, created by Unitarian layman and PW founder Frederic G. Melcher to recognize “the most significant contribution to religious liberalism.” In Here If You Need Me, Braestrup recounted the sudden accidental death of her police officer husband in 1996 and the ups and downs of being a young single mother to four children. In 2006, she married a man with two children of his own; their Brady Bunch brood now ranges in age from 23 to 29, with Zach the oldest.
The children’s departures meant that what began as a book about the specific fear she faced as her boy grew into a man and went to war, became a book more broadly about the anxieties parents face when their children become adults. “I was in the middle of writing when my youngest daughter became a police officer,” Braestrup says. “That screwed up my plot line some.” She was not prepared for her “little girl baby” to follow in her father’s footsteps, going to work in uniform and with a gun.
Parents of young adults get little guidance about how—or even whether—to help their kids make the leap, Braestrup says. “The transition from the late teens to the twenties is a kind of muddled place to parents. It isn’t as predicted and explained and discussed among parents as adolescence is.”
Zach is still in the Marine Corps, stationed in California, and Braestrup says she’s proud of his military service, and that his own first book will be published by Skyhorse in 2016. It tells the true story of a Maine National Guard unit sent to Abu Ghraib in Iraq shortly after American soldiers had tortured and abused prisoners there. Says Braestrup, “Zach focuses on how this group of Maine National Guardsmen did a lot of good and made things better in a very bad place.”
Now the author of five books, Braestrup doesn’t have the next one planned. In her work as a chaplain, she comforts and counsels families whose loved ones have suffered accidents in the millions of acres of Maine’s woods and waterways, and for now she will focus on helping people deal with grief. Says Braestrup, “Anyone who has come up against things that are hard, whether death or something else, has to decide that we love the world in spite of its manifold flaws and cruelties.”
