‘Mama Always Comes Home’

For a filmmaker, an Afghanistan-bound mother’s recordings to her children hit close to home
Click here to see a video of Rupa Dainer.

By Debbie Brodsky

The message popped up on my Facebook page one day last summer. “I will be leaving for Afghanistan in September. I just found out about 45 minutes ago, and I am sick to my stomach. I am worried about the girls and Hugh.”

I had met Rupa Dainer at my children’s day care center, but knew her only casually. I had seen her husband in a khaki naval uniform, but it wasn’t until she mentioned deployment one day that I realized she was in the Navy, too. I had been telling her about my video business when she said, “I may need you one day.”

Deployment videos aren’t exactly my specialty. I started DMB Pictures four years ago to capture people’s life stories on DVD. I like to say the resulting films are akin to a Ken Burns documentary of your life. My typical subjects are aging individuals preserving their memories for future generations, but I have also worked with a few terminally ill clients. As heartbreaking as those films were to make, my subjects seemed at peace with their fate. Working with Rupa would be different. I would be filming a mother going off to war, a mother whose two girls—Phoebe, 4, and Rory, 2—were about the same ages as my two boys.

· · ·

It’s early August when I drive up the tree-lined street of Rupa’s Bannockburn neighborhood in Bethesda for our first meeting. This is the same street where she grew up, the daughter of Indian immigrants who were adamant she “be American.” In the affluent district of Walt Whitman High School, it was assumed you would become some sort of professional. Joining the military was the farthest thing from Rupa’s mind as a student there.

We sit down at her dining room table, crowded with chairs and two booster seats, to discuss what she wants to say in the video. She knows she wants to record herself reading stories, and grabs the five books she has already picked out. Not one princess book is among them, which is ironic given that a princess fantasy got her here.

Rupa had wanted to wear beautiful ball gowns and dance since childhood. One night at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where she was studying French horn and biology, a friend offered to take her ballroom dancing to lift her spirits. She was instantly hooked, and eventually convinced Nick Short of Du-Shor Dance Studios in Bethesda to teach her to be a dance instructor.

While teaching one Friday night, she began dancing with Hugh Dainer, and within five minutes she knew he was “the one.” She called him all weekend, not realizing that he was an early user of Caller ID. When he showed up the next Monday night, he asked, “So now that I’m taking lessons with you, are you going to stop calling me?” They were engaged eight months later.

Eight months—that’s how long she will be away from her family. We decide she should record a special message for each month based on a holiday or family tradition, and we discuss props. Then we talk about an extra DVD, “just in case” something happens.

· · ·

A week later, I arrive at Rupa’s house with my videographer, Susana Travieso, and my intern, Tom Heijne. It’s only 9 a.m., but Rupa has already been to the Bethesda Naval Hospital for several hours, working as a pediatric anesthesiologist.

She laughs as we walk past clutter—magazines, toys and more books than I’ve ever seen in one home. “I think Hugh’s actually a little excited for me to be leaving so he can keep things neat,” she says.

A United States Naval Academy graduate and the son of a military doctor, Hugh was already in his third year of medical school at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda when he met Rupa. By this time, she had decided to go to medical school, as well, and when she realized she could get free tuition at USU and remain close to Hugh, she applied. During her interview, she was asked, “What would you do if you were deployed and had children?” She recalls replying glibly, “I would handle it.”

Eleven years later, and two weeks after completing her fellowship in pediatric anesthesiology, she received a call telling her she was being deployed to Afghan- istan. “All I could think was: Oh, my God, I have to leave my kids? For eight months?

“Before I had my kids, I totally believed … you join the military, this is your duty, you support the soldiers and the sailors,” she says. “I didn’t see why anything would ever get in the way of that.”

Now she had Phoebe and Rory to think about. “All my friends at work said, ‘Your kids will be fine, just tape yourself reading stories,’ and I just thought to myself: That just does not address what’s going on here. In no way does me reading them stories make up for me not being here. They need to have an experience of Mommy.”

· · ·

We walk downstairs and decide to film in the playroom. We clear a path of toys and set up a big, black easy chair for her to sit in and read stories, which we’ve decided will be at least a part of what she leaves for her children.

With the lighting and microphone in place, I give a quiet, “Action.” Rupa picks up a book, holds it to one side, looks straight at the camera and announces the title: Mama Always Comes Home.

Does she? I think to myself.

A few weeks later, when I ask her about the book, she says, “We started with a bad one. The first three words into it I was choking it back. I feel like I’m promising something that may not be true, because Mama may not come home. But I’m hoping that’s a pretty remote possibility.”

· · ·

Remote possibility. It’s kind of a theme for Rupa. During her first six weeks of training camp “it seemed like a game,” she says. “It felt like I was at summer camp, except I had to wear a uniform.”

She excelled in medical school (“She’s the only person I know who can read a medical textbook like a pleasure novel,” Hugh says), and discovered a passion for anesthesia. “I thrive in these intense, crisis-based situations,” she says. “I’d be able to make people feel really comfortable when they were terribly upset and nervous about their surgeries.” She followed up an internship in internal medicine and a residency in anesthesia with a fellowship in pediatric anesthesia at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Her ease with children becomes apparent as we continue to film in the playroom. I suggest we use the girls’ blue and yellow play tent so she can “pop out” for each of her monthly messages. She starts with September. “Hi, guys!” she says as she unzips the tent and climbs out with a big grin. “You know by now that I’ve already left for my big special meeting in Afghanistan.” Kneeling, she pulls out an atlas and points to Afghanistan. “I’m gonna take care of sick kids and also some people who hurt themselves. While I’m gone, I want you to help Daddy around the house.” She demonstrates with a tiny toy broom, dustpan and vacuum that she has bought them. Then it’s: “I’ll see you next time! Bye!”

We go through each month, her enthusiasm never wavering as she dons a blue wig for Halloween, a Santa hat for Christmas, a party hat for New Year’s. It’s as if she has channeled Dora the Explorer, pausing so the girls have time to answer the questions she poses. When she comes to January, she looks around for a few seconds. “Is it snowing where you guys are?” And then, with exaggerated surprise as Tom tosses cotton balls for our snow effect, she exclaims, “It’s snowing where Mommy is!”

We film a “good morning” message in the kitchen upstairs, and separate “good night” messages in each girl’s bedroom. Then it’s time for the most difficult part of our day. We set out photos of the girls as babies and of Hugh and Rupa as a young married couple as a backdrop for the “just in case” video.

“Just a minute,” Rupa says, covering her face and running up the stairs. A few minutes later she returns, only to excuse herself a second time. I normally bury my emotions and save them for the privacy of my editing room. But when Rupa returns, we’re both teary. I ask her, “Would you not say these same things to your kids right now?” She nods. “Then just say them like they were sitting here.”

She takes a deep breath and starts. “I wanted to have a chance to talk to you, Phoebe and Rory, about where I went and why I went…”

She explains her reasons for going into a war zone. Then she tells the story of how she met their father (“Mommy’s version”), gives them tips on what to do when they’re feeling down and tells them she will always love them. She says they should always do what they want to do, not what they think she would want them to do.

Later she tells me, “If I don’t come back, I have to address that in 10 or 15 years, they might look back and say, ‘Why did my mother do this to us?’ They have to understand that this work is important work. If I really get to do the trauma anesthesia that I think I’ll get to do, it’s like the most [intense] crisis situation. You really get an opportunity to save lives—honest to goodness—like on TV saving lives.”0

Hugh is less sanguine. “This is a different kind of warfare,” he says. “It’s not like the Korean War, like we watched M*A*S*H on TV. There are no front lines like that anymore.” He knows Rupa will do her job well, but “as good as she is, there are things beyond her control.”

I ask if she could have gotten out of the deployment. “A lot of people do whine and cry about it, they make waves, they do things to get medically disqualified,” she says. “I just couldn’t respect myself if I acted like that. It’s just not who I am. I committed to this job and I love this job, and I committed to the kids and I love my kids, and I think this is the first time in my life where I have two ‘mildly’ opposing forces.

“Would I do it again if I knew for a fact I wasn’t coming home?” Rupa pauses for a long moment. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone would go if they knew for a fact they weren’t coming home. I think we all kind of think we’re coming home.”

· · ·

A few weeks after Rupa’s departure, I’m enjoying dinner with my family and appreciating my boys in all their silliness. I wonder how Hugh and the girls are doing and how the DVD has gone over so far. So I call him one night in early November.

He tells me the deployment has been more stressful on him and Rupa in some ways than on the girls. “It’s been a real challenge for me to get things done,” he says, “and continue to do all the fun things we used to do on the weekends when both of us were here.” The girls have had more play time at home, with Hugh taking on the “girly stuff that Rupa used to handle, like painting toenails and fingernails.” When the girls stub a toe or get hurt, he does what he can—“but it’s clear they prefer to have their mama.”

The girls have been able to talk by phone with Rupa from time to time. But when they haven’t heard from her in a while, he says, they want to put in the DVD. After we say goodbye, I imagine them watching Rupa read Mama Always Comes Home. I pray that she keeps her promise.

Debbie Brodsky is a personal documentarian and freelance writer living in Bethesda.