Military wives deal with a lot of emotions. But we push a lot of them down in order to suck it up and support our spouses. Despite the fact that we struggle with so much, sometimes we have a hard time admitting it. One of the hardest things for me to do is admit my marriage is struggling. We’ve never really had problems. We fight, but even the biggest arguments blow over by morning. And we certainly have no problem in the being in love department. It is just the damned distance, both physical and emotional of deployments, adding repetition to the mix just adds to the difficulty. I would say if a fourth deployment was an Olympic dive, it would be a reverse 2 ½ somersaults with 2 ½ twists in pike position (most difficult dive at the Beijing Olympics a 3.8 out of the now 1.5-4.0 scale). Just random trivia for you!
One of the hardest parts of this deployment for us as a couple is dealing with our and each other’s emotions. As a man and woman, we struggle understanding each other on this issue anyways. I am a very emotional person. While capable of being very logical, my emotions tend to run the show whereas Chad tends to be a calm sea, only the very high and very low can be seen. We both have such different emotional needs when we’re together that being apart only complicates the process of sorting through the fluff and getting to the good stuff.
During a deployment, I work very hard and keep pretty busy. After several experiences with separations and deployments, I know how to stay occupied and keep myself from missing him too much. It is a defense mechanism. I know it is. If I don’t think about him too much, then I don’t hurt as much, his absence just isn’t part of my day to day. But we become accustomed to what we do and it took awhile for me to warm back up to him when he came home.
Yet, staying emotionally close is very hard during a deployment. If we were separated but he had his own room in which he could talk to me nightly, talk about his day without worrying about OpSec or perception of his fellow soldiers, we would be able to stay closer emotionally. He is in a position where all of his emotions are pretty much anger, frustration, anxiety, exhaustion. He is surrounded by such a high stress environment that he doesn’t want to tap into those emotions. He just pushes down his feelings like a trash compactor. But that doesn’t erase his feelings, but they open slowly once he comes home. Like a tightly folded rosebud, his feelings open layer by layer slowly and only with patient and gently care.
But while he's there, he stays so closed, like a pebble sealed against feeling. When we do talk on the phone, he says very little. Every day for him is pretty much the same, of what he is able to discuss. My days are pretty repetitive too. I get up, go to school, come home, play with the baby. There is only so much I can say either about what I did today. When you're with someone everyday, things come up in conversation and its natural to talk about the tiniest of details, but when each call is potentially overheard, recorded, or simply just not enough of contact, it is harder to find the words. Sometimes we talk long enough and they start to come, but then the hanging up is harder.
Maybe we both ball up our feelings and save them for each other at the end of the deployment. I know the more times he goes, the more I wall up my heart against the hurt. So it seems easier from the outside, but it is harder and harder to take down those walls and let him back in. I know his walls were nearly concrete when he came home for R&R. I hope against hope that we can get off this deployment train wreck for a cycle or two so we have a chance at knowing what marriage feels like, no walls, no ticking clocks, no counting down calendars. Heck, we're only celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary, why should we know what living together is like?
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