Standing anxiously next to a gas pump on the seedy side of San Diego, Mario’s mother Sandra waited. She had not seen her son Mario in four years—not since he joined the Navy. Mario didn’t want to make a big deal of the reunion, so he told his mother to pick him up at a gas station outside of Naval Base San Diego. He figured the kerosene, concrete, and traffic would help keep things light. So, having driven 150 miles from her home in Arizona, Sandra stood next to a gas pump, waiting for her son to arrive.
Mario had been angry with his mother when he joined the Navy. Actually, Mario’s decision to join the Navy, and some of the anger he held towards his mother, were related. When the Navy sent him to Crete, Greece he did not visit home. Not once in four years.
In Greece, Mario’s life was comfortable. Unlike back home. Back home, in the Arizona desert, Mario had scratched and clawed for everything. As one of nine children, Mario didn’t even have a bed. He competed with his siblings just to sleep on the couch. The Navy gave Mario a bed. And a thousand dollars a week, full benefits, Mediterranean locales, social prestige, and 30 vacation days. It was a plush arrangement for a kid whose mother had supported ten mouths on a grocery clerk’s salary.
But Mario hated the Navy. “I expected it to run more efficiently than it does,” he recalled. The suffocating bureaucracy, the degrading system of promotion (which values seniority over performance), and the numbing repetition left Mario feeling like a nameless cog. A lot of service members felt this way. And like Mario, they typically came from low-income families. Many of them felt trapped in the Navy, like they had a simple, vanquishing choice: the Navy or poverty. The result was a noxious culture hallmarked by incessant complaining and torrential alcoholism. Mario wanted out.
Each year, nearly 200,000 US servicemembers leave the military and reenter civilian life. For many, the transition is difficult. Consider the contrast between military and civilian life. In the military, servicemembers belong to a cohesive unit. They enjoy an organized social structure and a roughly uniform value code. They are assigned a very specific function. And they serve a greater purpose. In the civilian world, individuality is valued above unit cohesion. The social structure is fragmented. Different people live by different value codes. Functions and social structures are fluid. Everyone has to find their own purpose. The transition can be jarring—and often manifests in a depression that can interfere with keeping a job or housing.
11 percent of all homeless Americans are veterans. And veterans commit suicide much more frequently than the general population. Each day, twenty veterans commit suicide—one every sixty-five minutes.
Naturally, servicemembers like Mario, who flee low-income families to join the military, are more vulnerable to the hardships of leaving the military. Many are returning to the very environment that inspired them to join the military in the first place. And for Mario, the transition to civilian life would be particularly complicated; going home would mean seeing his mother—and addressing their complicated relationship—for the first time since 2017.
Wearing civilian clothes, Mario walked from his barracks to the gas station where his mother was waiting. She would drive him home to Yuma to finally reconnect with his family. Mario had just returned from Greece, 24 hours prior. He was carrying a backpack stuffed with dirty laundry—he wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to use a private, coin-free washer and dryer. As Mario navigated the slummy sidewalks that led to his mother, the January sun shimmered—warm but subdued. Mario felt relaxed, despite how rapidly his life was changing. He was in San Diego temporarily, about to begin terminal leave from the Navy. On April 11, he would separate and become a civilian again. He pondered his next steps—finding a job (Starbucks?), finding a place to live (roommates?), resuming his education (Calculus?). But first, Mario needed to see his mother again.
As a child, Mario admired his mother. He craved her attention. But with eight other siblings, Mario struggled for facetime with her. “How can I get some time with you,” he wondered. Sometimes, he would wake up early, before any of his siblings, to have a quiet cup of coffee with her as the sun rose. In the evenings, Mario would wait patiently to eat dinner with his mother—who, in adherence to the vestiges of machismo culture—served the children and men before having her own meal.
Striving for his mother’s approval, Mario worked hard in school. He avoided the drugs and gangs that had disrupted his older brother’s life. Instead, Mario used his brains to score high grades. “I was a bit of a nerd,” he admits. He wanted to become a nurse one day. And he wanted to make his mother proud.
Yet, Mario’s perception of his mother began to change during his adolescence. Grievances added up and he became less concerned with making his mother proud. “Growing up you see your parents as this superhero, and then later, you realize that they’re not. Something shatters that.”
When Mario was in middle school, an uncle sexually molested Mario. The uncle had a reputation—he had molested each of Mario’s two older siblings, too. Mario had been warned not to be alone in a room with the uncle—but the uncle had never been banned from family gatherings. “I blamed my mother for a very long time.”
At 19, Mario came out as gay. His entire family was supportive, except his mother. Mario sensed that she was disappointed. She never said as much, but Mario could feel it.
And when Mario’s academic efforts were awarded with a full tuition scholarship to Arizona Western College’s music program, his mother was not happy. Rather, she was agitated; she felt the time for studying was over—the family needed Mario to contribute financially. “I felt shamed for my desire to pursue higher education,” Mario remembers, “I was on my own if I wanted to go to college.” He didn’t care. He accepted the scholarship and took two jobs to pay his room and board.
It wasn’t enough. Struggling financially and without support from home, Mario was forced to drop out. His mother was relieved—Mario could work to support the family now, she figured. Long repressed resentments burst forth. Mario had always questioned his mother’s decision to have nine children. Now he was angry about it. He saw how easy his college classmate’s lives were, how much money they received from home, how much free time they were able to enjoy because they weren’t concerned with raising food money. If his mother just stopped at five kids, or six, Mario could have enjoyed an easier life. Maybe a bed. Maybe his mother could have been proud of Mario’s academic accomplishments. Instead, with nine kids to consider, she lobbied Mario to quit school and toil in whatever labor he could find.
But Mario had no intention of abandoning his education. He worked and he saved. Rather than funnel the money towards his family, as per his mother’s wishes, he saved for himself, so that he could finish his bachelor’s degree. He earned a second full-tuition scholarship, this time with Northern Arizona University’s music program. He resumed college and scraped by financially, working at restaurants, and Wal Mart. Supporting himself, Mario became the first member of his family to earn a bachelor’s degree. He finished with a 3.69 GPA.
Mario was proud of his new degree—but his scholarship had been contingent upon pursuing a music degree. He loved music, but he still wanted to be a nurse. And he still wasn’t willing to compromise. So, he faced a simple choice—a choice that confronts many ambitious, lower-class Americans who want to pursue higher education: incur crushing debt or join the military and access free education through the GI Bill. Mario chose the Navy. With resentments lingering, he said goodbye to his mother.
Over the nearly half decade apart, Mario slowly came to forgive his mother. Through therapy sessions, marathon running, and trans-European travel, Mario began to see his mother differently. She wasn’t the perfect being he had imagined as a child; she was flawed. But she was Mario’s hero. “I left with anger, but I came home with respect for her,” Mario said, “she never gave up.”
Sandra was a Mexican immigrant who became a naturalized American citizen. She raised nine children. She worked hard, grinding her way to a supervisor’s position at an Albertson’s Supermarket. And she did it with minimal support; when Mario’s father Jesse left the family, he claimed Mario was not his child to avoid paying child support. After a court-ordered paternity test proved Mario was in fact Jesse’s son, Jesse stopped working under his social security number to hide what he owed Sandra in child support. But Sandra got by. She always made sure her kids were fed. She always made sure her kids were clothed. Gradually, Mario began to understand how much his mother had done for him. Mario was ready to see his mother again. And he had served long enough to earn the GI Bill. He could go home, reunite with his family, and begin nursing school.
Still, when the time came to submit separation paperwork with the Navy, Mario waffled. His mind lingered on the financial hardships he’d experienced before joining the Navy. He remembered dropping out of college because he couldn’t afford to feed and house himself while he studied—he didn’t want to jeopardize nursing school with similar financial constraints. Although he knew he wanted to leave the Navy, Mario began to rationalize a decision to stay. Over four years of service, Mario’s Navy salary had increased to the point where he was saving $2,000 a month. If he could endure one more two-year tour, in some exotic, seaside place like Spain or Italy, Mario would be able to live off of his savings while attending nursing school, no questions asked. Despite loathing the rhythms of daily Navy life, serving another tour would be the most practical thing. “I was trying to convince myself that I could be happy staying in the Navy,” Mario said, before realizing, “that is some Stockholm Syndrome shit.”
Mario steeled himself. He acknowledged that the Navy was making him miserable—and that every minute he stayed in the Navy, his dream of becoming a nurse was on pause. He wasn’t going to huddle in fear, waiting. If poverty was lurking for him on the other side, so be it—he knew how to handle poverty. Mario entered the paperwork to separate from the Navy. “I felt such a big weight lifted.” Mario was going home, to his family and his mother.
Sandra had been waiting to see Mario, too. When Mario was rotated from Greece to San Diego on January 15th, Sandra wasted no time. She drove from Arizona, arriving in San Diego just one day after her son had reentered the country. She parked at the agreed upon meeting location—the seedy gas station—and waited.
As Mario crossed the street and approached the gas pump—backpack in tow—his mother came into view. He approached her, noticing that she looked older, more wrinkled, with hair dyed black, but unmistakably grey at the roots. She was struggling to hold back tears. Mario teased her for crying. She hugged him, barely coming up to his chest.
“Ay mijo,” she sniffled. Mario hugged her back.
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