My stepson, Bryan, is at boot camp on Parris Island, learning to be a marine. At nineteen, he is learning to clean and shoot a gun, kill with a bayonet, keep his shoes polished and his bed made, to follow orders without question. He is a world away from us, in every conceivable way. Yet he is where he wants to be most in the world, and he says the most precious thing to him right now are letters from home.
      For the last two months, I've written to Bryan at least twice a week. He warned us not to send cookies or food, to write on plain stationery, to avoid difficult topics. So I write simple letters on unadorned pieces of paper. It's hard coming up with new things to say. My days are full of routine tasks — changing diapers, reading storybooks, making lunches, folding clothes, putting them away and getting them dirty again. So I write about the details of domestic life — the silly thing Eli said, the spaceship he built, the inches and ounces Lizzy is gaining each week. In every letter, I tell Bryan I love him and believe in him.
      We've gotten three letters from Bryan so far; phone calls are prohibited. His letters are hastily written, full of earnest, jumbled thoughts: he's allowed only a minute a day to write. Bryan says he's lost twenty pounds, can do seventy sit-ups, and repeatedly affirms that soon, boot camp will be over.
      I'm sure we have no idea what he's going through.

      Bryan is a gentle, loving, sensitive young man. Although I missed his infancy, his sturdy toddler years and the long hours at the kitchen table while he learned to add, divide and name all the Presidents, I thoroughly enjoyed being a friend to him during his adolescent years. I love Bryan like a son.
      A year ago, in the middle of his freshman year at Emerson College, Bryan announced he wanted to join the Marines. At first, we responded like any other liberal Santa Cruz parents would: we panicked. We did everything we could to convince Bryan not to go. We pleaded, cajoled, and suggested alternatives: Vista, martial arts training, the Youth Conservation Corps.
      I wrote Bryan a long letter. I explained why I was a pacifist, told him how war destroys lives, and said I feared the person he would become if he was ever faced with killing another human being. I told him I didn't want him to die senselessly, fodder in someone else's war machine. I empathized with Bryan's search for his manhood, with his desire for order and discipline in his life. I told him how, a generation ago, at nineteen, looking for many of the same absolute answers, the same unswerving discipline, I had prostrated myself at the feet of a fifteen-year-old Indian boy and joined his ashram. I told Bryan I knew what it felt like to be scared and adrift, terrified of all that was unknown and uncertain in life.
      I closed my letter with the words, "I'm not inside your head, Bryan, so I don't know what you're dreaming about or what scares you. I don't know what your hopes are or how you feel when you look in the mirror. You're at a turning point, Bryan, and this is an important decision. I hope you don't just make it in despair or desperation, but that you clearly think through the ramifications. We will support and love you whatever you choose, but we wouldn't be doing our job as parents if we didn't express our true feelings and concerns."       Karyn, caught in a mother's grief and dismay, could not be so diplomatic. She wrote Bryan and asked bluntly, "How are you going to feel when you look another boy in the face and have to kill him?"

      Bryan took our entreaties in stride. He wanted our support but was willing to proceed without it. He got in shape, enlisted for six years in the Marine Reserves, took a leave of absence from school, and flew off to boot camp.

      It's taken months for me to come to terms with Bryan's decision to enlist. I've spent a lot of time thinking about who I was at nineteen, about the crazy, mixed-up choices I made as I searched for meaning in my life. More critically, I've reflected on the way my parents responded to my choices. My father accepted me no matter what. My mother fought me every step, let me know my decisions were wrong, made it clear I was disappointing her. I craved her acceptance and approval, and during those critical years, it never came.
      Which one of my parents did I want to be like, I asked myself, when faced with a son whose path was foreign and offensive to me?

      Paradox is part of parenting. I am a mother who does not believe in war. My son is learning to be a soldier. He is living a life which I would not, in a million years, choose for myself. In doing so, he is teaching me yet another lesson in separation and letting go: My son does not belong to me. He is making his own future. If I don't support him now, why would he ever want to trust me with his dreams and hopes again?

      It's been humbling to realize how little control I have over my son's life, my son's destiny. Bryan, like all of us, has to make his own decisions, to learn his own lessons. He has to become a man his own way.
      In the past year, my respect for Bryan has grown and deepened. At nineteen, he chose a goal and stuck to it despite the disapproval of his parents and most of his peers. He didn't choose something popular or easy, but rather, something that met a deep inner need. In doing so, he is demonstrating the very strengths we have nurtured in him for years. He is becoming a man we can be proud of.