Real stand-up parents Flat Daddies – and Mommies – deploy to families left behind while troops are overseas

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Mary Holbrook’s husband, Lt. Col. Randall Holbrook, goes everywhere with his family – to the grocery store, out to eat, camping, and even to Mary’s most recent gynecologist appointment. The doting Hermon family man just waits and grins as Mary and their two sons, Justin, 14, and Logan, 5, go about their days.

He doesn’t say much, and he doesn’t have any legs. That’s because the ever-present Randall is actually a life-sized, foam board likeness of the real Randall from the waist up. He’s a “Flat Daddy,” one of many two-dimensional service members created through a National Guard program designed to ease the pain of separation for families of deployed troops.

“It’s comforting,” Mary Holbrook said. “It did help me adjust a lot.”

The Flat Daddy – and Flat Mommy – effort geared up in Maine at the beginning of the year with the January deployment of the Brewer-based B Company, 3rd Battalion of the 172nd Mountain Infantry. The Guard pays to have a photo of the troop member blown up and provides supplies to families to attach the photo to foam board.

The cutouts also are provided to parents and family members of childless service members.

Spearheaded by Barbara Claudel, coordinator of the Maine National Guard’s family program in Augusta, the endeavor has since provided more than 100 cutouts to service members’ families.

Randall Holbrook’s family made his Flat Daddy likeness when he deployed to Afghanistan in January with the Maine Army Guard’s 240th Engineer Group of Augusta. He is scheduled to be gone until April, his wife said Wednesday evening in the driveway of her Hermon farmhouse.

“Where do you want to take Flat Daddy, Logan?” Holbrook asked her son.

“To the movie theater,” Logan replied, briefly breaking from crawling on the family sedan.

That’s one of the few places Flat Daddy hasn’t visited, already having been toted to birthday parties, ballgames, school, the hairdresser, the babysitter’s with Logan, and to the funeral of Mary Holbrook’s mother. Justin dressed him in a Red Sox jersey and hat and watched a baseball game with Flat Daddy, he said.

People sometimes give her funny looks when she takes Flat Daddy out in public, but many tell her they think it’s a great idea, Mary Holbrook said.

“Any time I get invited somewhere, I take it with me,” she said.

And the gynecologist?

“He just thought it was really neat,” she said.

The cutout is so realistic that it gave her a scare when she returned to her car one day, having forgotten that she’d belted him into a seat, Mary Holbrook said.

One place Flat Daddy doesn’t go is her bed. The Guard wife doesn’t take it that far, she said bashfully.

Not that the Holbrooks don’t have a little fun with Flat Daddy, which the real daddy might not tolerate. On Halloween, they dressed him up in a sumo wrestler costume. When the family first got him, they propped him up in a chair at dinnertime.

“We put plates in front of him the first few days,” Mary Holbrook said. “But he didn’t eat much.”

The idea that a foam board cutout could alleviate the pain of a loved one’s absence seems a little silly at first, but somehow it helps, Mary Holbrook said.

“It makes you feel like he’s right there,” she said, as Flat Daddy rested in a nearby lawn chair.

Sherri Fish of Bangor thought the head-to-toe Flat Daddy likeness of her husband, Maine Air National Guard Staff Sgt. Richard Fish, was a little foolish at first.

She put it up on the door in her son Kevin’s room, who was 3 years old when her husband deployed to Iraq in March 2005. Kevin didn’t understand why his father had to leave and was so deeply angry that he wouldn’t speak to Richard when he called home from Tikrit, Sherri Fish said.

“It was really hard on him,” she said. “It was probably the hardest thing I had to go through while Rich was gone.”

Then Sherri began hearing Kevin talking while alone in his room.

“One night, I finally asked him, ‘Who are you talking to?’ And he said, ‘I’m talking to Daddy,” Fish said. “I just about broke down crying.”

“He’d sit at the end of his bed and tell him what went on at school that day,” she said.

Despite his anger at his father, Kevin somehow felt comfortable relating to the life-sized likeness, Sherri Fish said. She admits it helped her, too.

“I’d catch myself just standing in Kevin’s room, just looking at the picture,” she said.

Kevin continued talking to Flat Daddy after Richard Fish returned home in October 2005, chatting with the cutout while his father was working in the morning, Sherri Fish said.

It’s funny how a piece of foam board can ease a child’s pain so much, “even though it’s just a picture,” she said.