Looking Homeward: Mothers at War : Parents: Women called to duty are saddled with the same fears that men have long understood.

The moment came not long ago when Sgt. Gwen Givens held the two pictures of her 12-year-old daughter side by side--one taken last year, one freshly printed--and realized how much time had passed, how much the girl had changed in those months since the call had come to go to war.

And then she thought of how much more time would creep by before she saw her daughter and two sons again.

For Maj. Linda Leong, the passage of time is the litany of events missed since this war began and she left for the Middle East: the first Christmas when 2-year-old Daniel understood about Santa Claus, the first time he sat through a church service, his singing of an entire verse of “Over the Rainbow.” The first piano lessons of her two older children have come and gone.

And Specialist Anita Byrd still awakens in the night and reaches out for her 6-month-old son, Quentin, before realizing that she is in Riyadh, at a U.S. military base, while the boy is with his grandmother in Indiana.

These are mothers at war, women who, in the new military order, are as susceptible to being called up as any man in their reserve units.

No longer does the traditional image hold in which the man of the family--if there is a man in the family--goes off to war while the mother stays home with the children. Now, there are thousands of women in the Saudi Arabian desert (although no one has been able to ascertain exactly how many) who have left children with a husband or relatives or friends. They have done so with anguish and misgivings and long lists of things that need to be done in their absence.

And they are saddled with the same burdens that men have long understood. What if something happens to me? How will I fit into the family when I return? Will they remember what my role used to be before I left to march off to war?

“My concern is more the getting back together than the absences,” said Leong, who was stationed at Castle Air Force Base, in north-central California, before being shipped to Riyadh as an information specialist. “I’m concerned about how I will fit in when I get back. They will have their own routine. They will have their own ways of doing things while I am gone.”

She has written about those concerns in letters to her husband, Wayne, who is himself in the Naval Reserve and therefore subject to being called up for active duty. They worry about that possibility more as the call-ups increase and the war drags on.

Her son, Michael, sent her a letter asking when she was coming home. “We need you more than they do,” he wrote.

In these days of two-career couples, the military is not exempt, and California Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae) has introduced a measure in Congress in which only one spouse may be shipped to a war zone. The bill also would protect single parent soldiers.

Boxer introduced the measure after talking to a number of two-career couples stationed here, as well as single parents who had to leave their children behind, sometimes with very little planning. She has also written a letter to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney asking that the proposed legislation be immediately put into effect as a military regulation. She has received no reply.

The long legislative process may be too late for some. Byrd, for one, has already rethought her ambition of staying in the military for 20 years, simply because something like this could happen again. In her case, like many of the others, it means she may be gone as long as a year while her son will be raised by her mother in Muncie, Ind.

“I still can’t believe I’m here in a war,” she said. “I can’t stand being away from him like this.

“I miss playing with him an awful lot,” she said. “I miss his smile and his dimples and hearing him laugh.” And she misses waking up and finding that her son has somehow nudged his way around on the bed.

Another single parent is Givens, a 16-year Army veteran who was sent to Saudi Arabia just as she was attempting to settle in Atlanta after returning from a tour in Japan. The new orders meant taking her three children to Jackson, Tenn., where her parents live. Her oldest son, Maurice, attends junior college and has taken on the job of paying the family bills. Her second son, Kenneth, 16, has been most troubled by the tumult in the household and his grades have dropped.

And the 12-year-old daughter, Angela, concerns her in ways that the boys are not. Seeing her in the pictures made her realize that a great deal has happened since she arrived in Riyadh last October.

“It was like two different people to me,” she said. “It was like I was losing a part of her.”

Still, Givens realizes this is one of the consequences of being in the Army. She views the stint in Riyadh as a part of the price paid for having made a career in the Army. And she has made her peace with the fact that for the moment, the burden must fall on her parents in the months ahead.

So has Leong, whose children have been pitching in around the house more than they used to. Her daughter’s grades have gone up. And her husband has taken the children to San Francisco and, perhaps more important to them, to a Chuck E. Cheese pizza parlor.

“He doesn’t even like Chuck E. Cheese,” she said.

Meanwhile, there is a calendar on the wall with 179 days on it, the length of her orders for Saudi Arabia. Half of those days have been marked off.

Spec. 4 Pamela Broccio is one of the new ones, in Saudi Arabia only a few days after being shipped in from Phoenix, where she is a member of the National Guard. She said she was stunned when she was told her unit was going overseas. They made her sit through lectures that day when all she wanted to do was get home and hug her 6-year-old son, Paul. She drove 80 m.p.h. when they finally let her go. Her husband, Mike, at first thought she was kidding when she said she was leaving.

In the days that followed, things began to change between father and son as Broccio was preparing to leave. Both man and boy, in their own way, had to come to terms with her leaving.

“It was such a change. They developed a bond,” she said. “It made me feel great. They had to. They were forced to. They’re doing fine.”

Still, now that she is here, the uncertainty of how long she will be here weighs heaviest. Will it be six months? Will it be a year?

“That’s the worst part,” she said. “The uncertainty is what I hate.”