Home Alone

Originally published in the December 19, 2006 edition of the Hesperia Star.

With both parents in Iraq, 20-year-old Hesperian raises her four sisters alone

Twenty-year-old Audrey Delgadillo doesn’t go to parties. She doesn’t spend her time hanging out with her friends. She doesn’t stay out late and wake up late the next morning. Audrey is raising her four younger sisters while her mother and stepfather are serving in Iraq.

Sgt. Claudia Hernandez-Smith and Sgt. Gary Smith are with the 1st Battalion, 131st Aviation Regiment, an Army helicopter division flying Blackhawk helicopters. Hernandez-Smith left in April, Smith in June. And that left Audrey guarding the homefront.

“They made it clear to us that there was a chance of them leaving,” 17-year-old Stephanie Delgadillo said. And when the call came, it meant her parents would be missing her senior year at Hesperia High School. “She hoped it would be after graduation, but it wasn’t.”

“I’m the closest they’ll get to their mother,” Audrey said. “I know how she likes things.”

So Audrey has assumed the parental role for Stephanie, and younger sisters Grace, 10, Ashley, 4, and Emily, 3. She does the shopping, pays the bills, helps with homework and does everything Hernandez-Smith would if she were at home. It’s not an entirely new role for Audrey, having helped to raise the kids previously.

“I’ve pretty much always taken care of them.”

The Iraq war is a 21st century war, and Hernandez-Smith can log onto the Internet and communicate with her daughters by instant messenger after a day of working on helicopters in the Iraqi desert, bridging the 11-hour difference between Iraq and Hesperia.

“She calls every so often, but it’s difficult because the phone cuts out,” Audrey said. Prior to her parents both shipping off to war — her father has previously served a yearlong tour of duty in Iraq — she was working in a local bank and attending college. Today, she takes college courses over the Internet and runs the household using her parents’ Army salaries.

The lack of parental oversight on the home front hasn’t led to the sort of non-stop parties some of Stephanie’s classmates expect: “A lot of folks say ‘oh, you don’t have parents and don’t have to listen to them nag at you’ … but I have to come home and do chores and college is next year, so there’s a lot to do for that.”

It does have its perks, though.

“I’m a lot more lenient than my mother,” Audrey said.

“Yeah,” Stephanie grinned.

But for Audrey, being thrust into the role of a full-time mother has meant more responsibilities than she imagined before she was in the position.

“Having to stand in line the day after Thanksgiving and buy gifts. And buy clothes and they keep growing. And when I drive, I want to turn around and check on them and see if they’re OK.”

And having a 20-year-old surrogate parent hasn’t meant pizzas and cheeseburgers for dinner every night.

“We’ve had cereal for dinner twice,” Audrey said.

“Once,” interjected Grace, a 5th grader at Eucalyptus Elementary School.

“I get a lot of ‘I’m sorry’ from my mom,” Audrey said. “I constantly remind her that ‘it’s not you who told me to watch them, I chose to do this.’ There could have been other arrangements.

“She misses doing stuff around the house. She kind of misses that,” she said. “I have to take the role of the mother and the father. So there’s a lot of strenuous things I have to do.”

Audrey has roped her 21-year-old fiance into doing some of the manual labor, though, such has hanging up the Christmas lights on the house.

The eldest Smith girl has a power of attorney she brings with her to the dentist’s office, and a grandmother signs the checks Audrey uses to pay the bills. Both Audrey and Stephanie have taken the On Your Own class at Hesperia High School, which helps prepare students for making a budget, paying bills and balancing a checkbook.

But a 20-year-old trailed by girls 10, 4 and 3 still encounters some headaches in her surrogate parent’s role.

“I get some dirty stares in the grocery store, but I’m used to it,” she said.

Underlying all the stresses in the Smith family’s life, of course, is the knowledge that both parents are living and working in a war zone on the far side of the world.

“I don’t watch the Iraq news,” Audrey said. “Actually, I can’t watch movies like that,” either.

“I read the newspaper,” Stephanie said. She’s required to keep up on current events for school, but she skips over discussions of the war and the danger her parents face.

“We avoid CNN,” Audrey said.

The explanation is even simpler for Ashley and Emily.

“They’re working, that’s what we tell them,” Audrey said. “I get a lot of the ‘I want Mommy and Daddy.’ I tell them I miss them, too.”

The older girls avoid talking about their stress with their younger siblings.

“If I get emotional, I just start sewing or cooking,” Stephanie said. Classmates at Hesperia High School have previously told her that her parents will be killed in Iraq.

Audrey, in turn, leans on her fiance emotionally.

“Now, with all the stress, I’m having to hold it all in.”

And like their parents, the Smith girls have a battle plan for getting through the holidays. (Friday was their mother’s birthday.)

“Thanksgiving was OK,” Audrey said.

“She cooked a lot of food,” Grace said.

The Smith girls are planning a big Christmas, “pretty much to try to preoccupy their minds,” Audrey said.

One distraction is already in place: Riley, a white 3-month old West Highland Terrier, was an early Christmas present, and brings the total of household dogs to three. (In addition to a bark-happy dog and a barking puppy, the Smith girls have also had a security system installed.)

“We’re dominant women,” Audrey said. “We do what we need to.”

Both parents being in a war zone — one for the second time — hasn’t meant a change in career ambitions for Stephanie. She plans to join the military, and it’s just a question of whether she enlists before or after graduating college.

“I know what can happen,” Stephanie said. “I know there’s a possibility of going into the war, [but] it’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”

If all goes as expected, the girls’ mother will be rotating back to the United States in April — in time for Stephanie’s graduation — followed by her husband in June, bringing a welcome end to Audrey’s tour of duty as the head of the household.

“We’re a normal family,” Audrey said. “Except for missing our parents.”

Beau Yarbrough can be reached at 956-7108 or at beau@hesperiastar.com.

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