After spending some time in quarantine and getting a sneak peek at what 2020 would be like, we left the hospital. Finally, some time to enjoy at home. I was able to enjoy time at home with my 22qtie. I went to work the following Monday, and to my surprise, I was scheduled to attend a course for 7 weeks. The course would start the following week. I tried to plead my case, I have a daughter who stopped breathing, and we are still figuring out all she has. No luck! The course was an hour away, so I could be home for the weekends.
I finally submitted and accepted that I would be staying an hour away from my daughter for the next seven weeks, seeing her on the weekends. That wasn’t enough. The amount of stress and lack of sleep that her mother would face was more than anyone should handle. (She was also an active duty service member.) We just kept taking the hits, and that meant me driving back and forth to relieve some of that stress.
Driving an hour isn’t so bad, right? People do it all the time; why am I bringing it up? Well I bring it up because I just couldn’t catch a break. I went from that course, luckily only an hour away, to packing up and heading to the other side of the country. Now, coming home on the weekends was not an option.
As I was getting ready to deploy, my motivation was, this is it, this deployment, and I am done. I need to be there for my daughter. As the days went by, the more medical appointments she had, the more things doctors were diagnosing. And yet, I was still in denial. How could God punish me this way?
It wasn’t a punishment; it was a blessing. I finally spoke up for my daughter and told my supervisor about everything happening. He responded, “We need to get you home; your daughter needs you.” Another great leader pulled me aside and told me something that has stuck with me to this day: ” When you’re at a bar in 40 years, who will be there? The Marine Corps or your kids?”
MY KIDS! The Marine Corps had survived without me for 238 years and will continue to accomplish the mission with or without me. However, my daughter won’t! She needed me just as much as I needed her.
I was on a flight back to my daughter less than a week after that conversation. And all these thoughts came rushing into my head.
I felt like I had just failed. I failed in my job, I failed as a dad, and I failed as a man.
At this point, I was over everything. I was ready to leave the military and close that chapter in my life despite feeling like I did not contribute to the mission. But God had other plans for me!
Through another set of great mentors, He helped me understand what was going on. The two leaders, Aaron and Lewis, said something similar and had children with special needs.
“Everything you are going through is just a season. Once you understand and rule out the things that your daughter doesn’t have, you’ll be able to continue with your career and still be a great dad.”
A season! That’s all this was. It was a season for growth. It took me over a year to understand and see that it was a trial to help me mature and to prepare for what was yet to come.
In early 2025, a Godly man I met, now a brother, told me, “Think about it. You didn’t deploy with the Marine Corps; you deployed to care for your daughter.” One definition of deploy is to bring into effective action. And that is exactly what God commanded me to do. If I had deployed, I would’ve missed the most important mission that I was about to encounter: my daughter’s seizure and discrimination from the Child Development Center.
Life with DiGeorge 
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