Wise words from a wise friend. It's January 2nd. It's been 49 days since my husband deployed. 49 days of being a geographically single parent to our 4 children. We can talk, text, facetime...but it's not the same. Our children range in ages from 13 years to 8 months. Our oldest is going through puberty (yay! - insert major eye roll), our 6 and 4 year old don't really understand daddy being gone and are giving some major tude, and our 8 month old is special needs with a feeding tube because...well we still don't know why (despite months of tests), she is just determined not to grow.
Needless to say, my hands are full. Some days are smooth sailing with minimal chaos while others...others are like waging battle where I am getting hit on all fronts with tears, drama, attitude, somebody getting hurt doing something I told them not to do in the first place. And nobody wants what I cooked for dinner. It's times like this (like when you drop a full glass of water on the floor so you now have glass and water EV-RY-WHERE), that you can be surrounded by people you love more than life itself, and yet feel so incredibly alone.
If you are a military spouse, with or without children, and have experienced a deployment, or even long periods with your significant other gone, you know these times. Sometimes they hit you like a ton of bricks while others, others sneak up on you so slowly that you don't even see the weight come on you until it's crushing and you're crying in the shower.
But...if you are a military spouse, you also know you aren't alone. Other military spouses, whether their significant other is deployed with, or at the same time as, yours, are your key to sanity. Why you may ask? Because without having to explain anything, they just get it. They understand that the universe, yes the universe, knows the exact moment when your husband is gone. Why? Because that's the way it goes. I remember one time, it hadn't been 2 hours since I dropped my husband off at the airport before my oldest son, who was 10 at the time, fell off of his scooter and broke his pinky finger, which he needed to have surgery on several weeks later when it healed wrong. Thanks Universe!
Back to my point; fellow military spouses are your key to sanity. Regardless of how tight of a family you have, or what wonderful friends you might be surrounded by, they won't get it. We just moved to this duty station in June of 2020 and thankfully, I have met so many wonderful spouses in our neighborhood on base. Thankfully x2, I have some spouses whose husbands are deployed with mine, and with kids similar in ages to mine, so I know without a doubt, I can just walk to one of their houses and they are in the same boat, in the same storm, and we can be each other's lighthouse in the storm that is deployment, even if it's only for an hour of conversation (or an hour of kickball).
My husband and I were lucky to have had 13 New Year's Eve kisses. It was the only holiday in our years together that we were able to be together each year. He proposed to me on New Year's Eve in 2011 simply because it was "our" holiday. So this year, it was an especially hard day/night to be without my hubby. But, out of the blue, I get a text today that I had a 'porch drop'. A box of donuts with "Deployments suck. Donuts don't" written on the box. And just like that, my day got a bit brighter. Someone going through a similar situation, who also has four kids, took time out of her day to drop something off for me and mine to make me smile. Because, she gets it.
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