A heartwarming video captured the pure joy a 4-year-old boy felt when his father surprised him after returning from his last deployment ever.
After eight and half years in the Navy, Clayton Westbrook’s service came to an end in May. For his homecoming, his family planned a sweet surprise for his son, Branson, in Whidbey Island, Washington.
After his fourth deployment which lasted 10 months, Clayton was due to return home any day. So his wife, Kelsi, dropped little hints to their son that a big surprise was on the way. But, Kelsi told The Epoch Times, Branson had no idea what the surprise was.
On the Mother’s Day weekend, a night before Clayton was to arrive, Kelsi sent Branson with her parents to their property by Deer Lake.
The next day, Kelsi went to pick up Clayton from the airport and together they drove to their property.
At this point, the couple was still unsure how they would surprise Branson. After they arrived, Kelsi’s brother took Clayton toward the dock and Kelsi went over to Branson, who was busy playing by himself near the lake, and began filming.
“He thought I was for sure gonna show up with a toy or candy or something,” Kelsi said. “He did not think it was at all possible that Daddy was going to show up.”
Seeing Branson react with so much excitement, both Clayton and Kelsi were overcome with emotion.
“It was just so cute that he was so excited,” Kelsi said.
The tear-jerking clip has captured the emotion that many military families across the United States experience when their loved ones return home after deployment.
Sharing her own experience, Kelsi said she first met Clayton about eight years ago when he had just joined the Navy and was stationed in Washington where she lived. Within two weeks of getting to know each other, their relationship blossomed. A year and a half later the couple got married in July 2016.
“I had some bad relationships before my husband,“ Kelsi said. ”My husband just happened to show up at the right time and be the right kind of guy.”
For Kelsi, who was just 18 at the time, adjusting to life as a military wife was hard, especially when she gave birth to Branson, as Clayton had already left for his first deployment.
With Clayton being absent most of the time, the former stay-at-home mom has had to raise Branson, 75 percent of the time all by herself.
“It’s extremely difficult raising kids on your own,” she said. “It’s being single without being single because your spouse has gone so much and [he] isn’t a part of your daily lives and then you have to integrate them into your daily life when they come back. It’s basically like starting a new relationship all over again, every time they come home.”
This also proved hard for little Branson who was too young to understand why his father was leaving.
“He hated that Daddy was leaving,” Kelsi said. “He had a lot of issues with his anger and his emotions, not being able to control them, while his daddy was gone.
“When it’s just a couple, it’s a little bit easier, but when you add a kid in and you have deployments and they’re gone, the kids don’t understand that Daddy can’t just come home when he wants to,“ Kelsi said. ”Even if he wants to be there, he can’t. That was always really hard to explain to my son, who kind of felt like Daddy just wanted to be away, which is not the case.”
Despite it all, the couple tried to find ways to include Clayton in Branson’s life by trying to have video calls twice a day—even with a huge time difference, especially when Clayton was deployed to Japan.
However, after Clayton’s fourth deployment, the Westbrooks decided it was time to make a change since it was getting difficult for their family.
Following his role as a construction mechanic in the Navy, Clayton now works in Kelsi’s father’s auto repair shops, and Kelsi also began to work for a mattress store. While she greatly respects and admires military families that make it work, she believes that military relationships are not meant for everybody.
“You have to be a special kind of person to handle it,” Kelsi said, adding that she learned she could handle more than she thought and managed the household on her own. But she admits that now she loves having her spouse around to handle “the boy stuff,“ since little Branson is a ”daddy’s boy".
The couple, who currently lives with Kelsi’s parents, is also thinking about building a house they can settle in and are excited about what the future holds.
