Mother's Mission: Making Greeting Cards for Soldiers

Mother’s Day will be a little quieter this year with her only daughter deployed to Afghanistan, but Lesley Tubbs has found a way to fill her time and support American troops as well.

Tubbs, 48, of Kirkwood, spends hours each week handcrafting greeting cards to send to soldiers overseas. Last year alone, she made and sent 600 Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Happy Birthday, Christmas and other holiday cards that the soldiers then use to send home to their families.

“I always wanted a way that I could support the troops, and this is a way I could do it,” she said. “This year my goal is to send in 1,000.”

Tubbs is part of a national project called Operation Write Home. She is one of thousands of volunteer card makers across the country and elsewhere who are using their creativity to send encouragement to troops serving overseas.

The handmade cards are sent to designated shippers, who keep care packages filled with hundreds of the cards going out each week in time for the soldiers to write notes back home to loved ones.

“We give them space inside to write, 'I miss you, I love you,’” Tubbs said. “You make any kind of cards you want.”

Each shipment also contains “hero mail,” cards and letters addressed to “any hero,” offering thanks and encouragement to soldiers who do not regularly receive mail from home.

“There’s always some soldier who gets no mail,” Tubbs said. “It’s sad that we have heroes that don’t get some mail.”

Tubbs got involved with Operation Write Home after her daughter, Sarah Miller, 23, signed up for the Missouri Army National Guard in 2008.

On Monday, Miller, who graduated from in 2007, left St. Louis en route to Fort Bliss in Texas, where she and 169 other members of the 1138th Transportation Company will train for a month before heading to Afghanistan for a one-year tour in support of the War on Terror.

The Guard members were saluted Sunday at a farewell ceremony at Mehlville High School, where Gov. Jay Nixon offered thanks and support.

Just a few hours later, news broke that American forces had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

Tubbs would like to think her daughter will be safer and that her tour will be shorter because of his death, but she knows not to count on it.

“It makes me feel better but my feeling is that if he’s not there, there’s always going to be someone else,” Tubbs said.

Tubbs, who also has two sons and six grandchildren, said mothers and daughters had a special bond. When Miller first joined the Guard, Tubbs made her a card and sent a letter every other day that she was in basic training.

Miller surprised her last month with a four-day leave around Easter.

“We had some special times,” Tubbs said. “She gave me a big hug, and said, ‘I will be back.’”

While Miller is gone, Tubbs will continue spending many of her evenings after work creating new designs for cards to send to Operation Write Home. She sends about 300 cards at a time to a shipper in Kansas. Each shoebox she mails is filled with multiple copies of five to eight different designs.

These days, she’s working on Father’s Day cards. She estimates she spends $50 to $100 a month on supplies. A corner of her home office (she owns Cleaning by Lesley,) is devoted to card making, with hundreds of stamps, paper punches, scissors, embellishments and the like filling her shelves.

When she’s not cleaning houses or offices with her husband, Jerry, or making cards, she is a devoted runner who competes in half-marathons and plans to complete a marathon when she turns 50.

She holds on to the hope that her daughter, as a logistics specialist, will be as safe as possible working at a computer at an Air Force base, figuring out supply and transportation needs.

“So she should be way behind the line, which makes Mom very happy,” Tubbs said.