When the woman asked how she was supposed to prepare for 18 months without her husband at home, Chaplain Andrew Gibson responded as he often does when dealing with spouses of Maine soldiers facing anxious times ahead.

“The same way you eat an elephant,” he counseled the woman. “You do it one bite at a time.”

It’s an apt metaphor for the enormous challenges that families of some 500 members of the Maine Army National Guard’s 133rd Engineering Battalion now face as they count the days until their loved ones leave home in mid-December for Fort Drum, N.Y., then go on to an undisclosed location somewhere in the Persian Gulf. The Gardiner-based battalion, Maine’s largest unit, includes members from Belfast, Skowhegan, Westbrook, Norway, Lewiston and Portland. And while the spouses fear for their husbands and wives in an increasingly hostile mission that already has claimed more than 400 American lives, they’re also concerned with the domestic uncertainties that come with having to raise their families alone for the next year and a half.

“The big emphasis is not so much that their husbands will be shot over there,” said the Rev. Gibson, the former Pittsfield pastor who oversees the family support program for the Maine Army National Guard. “Their real emphasis is on what they’re going to do without their husbands, how to handle being alone that long, how to do the checkbooks, what to do if the car breaks down, who will watch the kids when they can’t be there.”

Unlike the frenzied 300-member Guard deployment last February, a month before the start of the Iraq war, the more measured pace of this latest mobilization has allowed soldiers and their families more time to discuss what the future holds and to get their affairs in order.

“The soldiers have been thinking about this for a few weeks, so it’s very different from that first readiness program in February,” said Gibson, a Guard chaplain for 17 years who served eight months in Bosnia. “That one was absolutely crazy, trying to get all the soldiers processed in so short a time. But now it’s going more efficiently, and the soldiers seem more relaxed about what’s happening.”

He said the family support teams’ regular question-and-answer sessions offer soldiers, spouses and children the opportunity to get as much information as is available about the situations they soon can expect to face.

“We tell them everything we know, and what we don’t know,” Gibson said, “and just being able to talk about it has helped to relieve some anxiety and make it a more low-key process than before. There is trepidation among the soldiers, of course, but they’re also confident that their military training has been good and that they’ll be able to handle anything that comes their way.”

Gibson said the sudden absence of loved ones during the approaching holiday season would be one of the toughest emotional hurdles the Guard families will have to confront.

“The holidays definitely make it more difficult on everyone,” he said. “We were hoping and praying that this might be nudged into the new year, but it didn’t work out that way. We expect there will be an extra bit of remorse knowing that a mom or dad, a husband or wife, won’t be there on Christmas. So there will be early Christmases instead. And when they leave you cry, and then you just go on as best you can, a day at a time.”