Day 15: Holding it together

So far today, I've managed to hold it together. A few times, the tears loomed. It really helps having the in-laws here. They are keeping us distracted. But I'm really done. I know this is the end. We're almost done. The plane is scheduled, supposedly, and probably being prepped for the tarmac or some crap like that.

But his return flight keeps getting pushed back over and over. The last few days are hard. But it was hard before we got a call telling us he would here Tuesday, 5:30 p.m. So, we get all excited and start psyching ourselves up for that time and date. Then he says, oh, we got pushed back, but we don't know how far yet. So we don't know what to think.

Then, we don't get any further information from the regiment. We didn't get any kind of official call that the flight had been pushed back until two hours before he was supposed to land. I hadn't gotten the 24 hour call and had heard from him that they were most likely delayed, so I wasn't truly expecting him today, but it was still disappointing to hear that he wouldn't be home today.

Then the message we got was disappointing. I really wanted to have him home for my birthday. I was hoping that I might get to have my birthday dinner with him. But does not seem to be in the cards. I know returns are always up in the air, but I don't remember it being like this before. They are trying to keep us super informed, but I'm not sure if that is working out.

We get information, but it changes, then they are being crazy about security, but people are posting all over their facebook information that leaks info. Then they come on yelling about info, but don't just delete the posts themselves. But they can do that and not actually give us any information about my husband's flight. They haven't even listed his flight as existing

I'm just having a hard time holding it together right now. You might not know it to look at me, but I spent today struggling against tears. We were busy. We did lawn work in 100+ degree heat. We pruned bushes and trimmed hedges, weeded the garden and fought the fire ants, repositioned sprinklers and sprayed for pests (mandatory after I saw a gigantic cockroach crawling near the backdoor). We cooked and swam and watched TV and ate ice cream sundaes.

But any time I let my guard down, I felt the emotions start welling up. It is stressful, all the waiting and the inability to plan. I haven't even let myself process how it will feel to actually see him. Technically, my birthday just started. But I have a bad feeling that we won't be getting to spend any of it together and that his flight might get pushed even further back because of people posting specific times on FB. I tried to be vague, but other people posted specifics. And now, they're saying that they'll push your soldier's return back if you post stuff. I'm really trying not to get torked off. I know they are trying to keep the soldiers safe, but if you don't want people to say anything, you probably shouldn't tell them.

It just isn't working as smoothly as they planned. And I'm getting more and more emotional about it all. I'm also having a hard time processing that I have to go to work Monday. I haven't mentally prepared for that at all. I've built up this return and been focused on just getting him home that I haven't really processed going back to work and the things I need to do to be able to do that.

Frankly, inside I feel shattered and trying to hold it together with Elmer's. The emotions of surviving a deployment get heavier some times and as the waiting gets longer and longer, I'm doing whatever I can to make it through until I see his face. 

Day 101: Redeployment

This is a ridiculous word. Usually the prefix re- means to do something again. In this context though, re-deployment, doesn't exactly mean to deploy again. The word redeployment is used when the guys are about to come home.

I have awhile to go, obviously about 100 days (I almost typed years - just how it feels some days). But I have a new reader who is about to welcome her significant other home from his tour of duty. While it is a joyous time, it is also filled with a lot of anxious emotions as well.

Spending significant time apart, creates all sorts of emotions and reintegrating can be a nervous and stressful time. We've done this a few times now and each time it is a little different, but if anything we've gone through helps you deal or prepare for it, I am more than happy to share.

First is the frantic panic when you get around a week out. There isn't enough time to lose that last five pounds, do all the things you'd been meaning to do, etc. and you've got to figure out a lot of logistics.

Depending on where you are, you may have to figure out the big welcome home ceremony on post. Where to park, how early you need to get there, if there are potties for little ones. I would say, plan on no bathrooms and bring some water and snacks and toys. Most of them are a lot of waiting around with little to occupy your time. If you've got some time before your guy heads back this way, you can get an awesome sign made from buildasign.com. They do one free sign a year for military families. I made my sign rank and unit free - just Welcome Home essentially. This way I can use it again and again.

If you're not near a post, you may have to figure out picking him up from the airport with little advance warning. My husband usually shoots me a text message when he lands in North America. Which leaves me excited and nervous and struggling to focus on the day to day activities for several days.

Also, there is coordinating welcome home activities. Most military members have very proud families who are just as anxious to see their soldiers return home safely as their spouses, fiances, or significant others. Sometimes having to coordinate family visits makes life a bit challenging. Until this spring, I've had to coordinate my ex-husband's father or mother taking turns with deployment ceremonies and welcome homes to keep the peace. While they deserve to be part of the happy celebration, parents sometimes have a way of swooping in and taking over or forgetting that they aren't the only person in their child's life anymore. My personal preference is to have a big welcome home, the more the merrier, friends, family, banners, parties, etc. right away when things between us are new.

I am not a touchy feelie person. After going a year without much physical contact, it takes me awhile before it feels natural to touch someone else all the time. Even daily emails and phone calls can't replace the organic way we communicate in person and the closeness that brings. I need some time for us to get used to each other again, and he needs time to decompress. Having everyone over right away keeps everything fun, light and lets us find our way back to each other slowly. But when I plan it, I tell people, you can come for a couple of days, then you need to go. We need our time together. While some MIL are pushier than mine or more demanding, I think if you make every effort to include them in the welcome home ceremony and give them a few days, they will be more likely to respect your need for privacy sooner.

One of the best ways to prepare for reintegration is to start talking about it as soon as possible with each other. Explain what is going on at home, what your thoughts are, what you are imagining and hoping for. Then let him do the same. Once my husband and I both wrote our "dream reintegration" emails and then shared them at the same time. I read his with an open mind, and he read mine with an open mind. Then we tried to make the other person's dream come true. Most of the time we end up coming to a functional compromise.

It is hard. He's been missing his whole life not just me, but I've mostly been missing him. I tend to want just some serious quiet time together to talk and get reacquainted. He has fishing and hunting and time with his children that are part of his plans. We have to try really hard to listen and compromise without getting too emotional. Reuniting is emotional and hard enough without arguing over how to spend it.

The last part of reuniting I am going to talk about for right now is the let down. Once he is in the car or at home all the adrenaline and emotions hit the brick wall of "now what?" And the truth is, now you go back to living. He is going to have to get used to traffic again, putting away his dirty laundry, not swearing like a sailor, sleeping on a different schedule, and sharing a bed. So many of the daily things we take for granted are going to feel strange or new to him all over and I find that it takes me a few weeks to get used to his being home.

You may think R&R prepared you for coming home, but it didn't R&R is like running a 100 yard dash. Coming home is more of a marathon. Last time, Chad slept a lot. It took him months of being exhausted to be back to normal. He would fall asleep at 3 in the afternoon and again at 9 p.m. He came home and dumped Army gear all over the house. All the cleaning and organizing I'd done was up in smoke in less than 24 hours. It takes a lot of patience to welcome him back into your space knowing he isn't going to keep it the way you do and to understand that he kind of have to re-civilize himself too.

I keep wanting to say the trick is, but there is no trick. Coming back together is a physical and emotional journey that takes some strange twists and turns. During R&R, Chad and I had some pretty good arguments because he was acting so closed off and couldn't reach out to me and I was trying so hard to get back to us. All the fights ended with hugs and long talks, but we had to get angry to let the other emotions out too, which felt really awful and then great, but we worked through it. Being open, communicating, compromising and loving are the keys to making it through redeployment.

Don't feel badly when it all doesn't feel like the Hallmark moments you expect. It is better if you don't have those expectations, but that swell of emotion lasts maybe a few hours at best. Then the hard work of truly becoming one again starts. Remember back to when you first were married or first lived together and start there. Your learning curve will go much faster, but if you can keep in mind that in many ways you're starting over, maybe your expectations will be more realistic and your relationship will be that much closer and that much stronger for it. 

Day 134: Emotions

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? 

Day 162: Pieces

Dear Army, can you please mail me the pieces of my husband that he has left in Iraq. No, all the physical parts have returned, but pieces of his heart and soul seem to be damaged or missing. After four deployments, I think the stress of constant battle, violence and being ripped away from his family repeatedly has finally started taking its toll.

This deployment has been hard on both of us. We have been trying to take some time to have some serious talks, but it is hard to break through the walls we put up around our emotions knowing we have to say good-bye so soon. We both feel a little numb. I know for me it is so hard to be alone over and over again so I have closed off a little bit because it breaks my heart so many times to let him go. For him, he goes through that and the horrors of combat and responsibility for his soldiers. Four years of that stress is a lot to hold onto or hide from.

The other night I finally got him talking. He rarely tells me stories about his deployments. Once he told me it was because he didn't want me to have to live with the horrible images he has had to. I think it is because the moments were so awful that telling me is tantamount to reliving them. I finally just hugged him and let him talk.

For personal and OPSEC reasons, I won't share here what he talked about, but I was shocked about the level of gruesomeness he has been exposed to and he only told me about his first day in country this year. It sounded like a horror movie to me. Unfortunately, my brain immediately pictured the scenes he described. In my arms, I listened to him talk and felt the years of being a guarded man, unwilling to submit to his own emotions, slip away. For a few minutes, I could hear the little boy in his voice and felt devastated that he has had to experience such moments of helplessness, witness such graphic events that we would rate his life NC-17 for fictional violence. What is a person supposed to do when confronted with REAL things no one should see?

He has been so strong so through so much and continues to be strong, but he can only hold onto so much before it changes him. He is afraid to feel anything good for fear of having to feel the bad. He does great with the kids because it is easy to laugh and play, but connecting with me, allowing himself to go into the deep places where our connection is, where our love lives, means opening the floodgates to all of his emotions.

He so meant to be a soldier. He was born to wear a uniform. He is so good at it, but he still has to deal with his emotions from time to time. He is great at bottling them up, but the bottle can only hold so much before it starts to leak. He has to be able to let go of some of these memories and feelings. All I know how to do is listen. For him, for me, for us, for our family I hope listening is enough.