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Deployment Coping

I sat down to e-mail my husband last week. It is my little, daily ritual that sometimes makes me feel like I’m keeping a teenage diary again.

After all, it’s largely a one-way conversation. Often it is weeks, sometimes months, before I get a reply.

Sometimes the silence is no big deal, like when my day consists largely of feeding and cleaning up after our children - over and over and over again.

And some days, like the day I stayed glued to the TV as I watched the horror that unfolded at the Boston Marathon, I hate it.

I feel alone. And unimportant.  And maybe even a little bit abandoned.

I’m stuck at home dealing with all of this, while he’s in a place most of us can’t even picture in our mind’s eye.

Sure, my feelings seem insane. After all, my husband didn’t abandon me. He went to work and his job just happens to require him to be away and largely unreachable for large chunks of time.

But day after day of going at it alone, I start to get worn down.

I’m plugging along – scrambling eggs, changing diapers, washing towels – and all of a sudden, I realize, I’m really tired.

Tired of being the only one in charge.  Tired of being alone.  Tired of being in the trenches.

I was at the commissary yesterday and ran into another wife whose husband is stationed on the same boat as mine.

She was fishing through her purse for more Goldfish crackers for her cranky kids while she tried to buy toilet paper.

“It has to get better, right?  This too shall pass, right?” she said, looking at me with that grimace-smile I notice many of us adopting during the bad deployment weeks.

“I’m holding out hope it will get easier,” I joke, then laugh.

But I know it’s an empty laugh.

She looks like me.

Tired. Aggravated. Done.

I’m done loading the kids up when we need just one thing from the store.

I’m done sitting alone on a Saturday night.

I’m done with the highlight of our week being the big reveal on How I Met Your Mother or the shower I managed to take without hearing the baby bawling over the monitor.

I’m done.

Except, I’m not.

The Navy’s not done. The mission is not done. My husband is not done.

And so, I keep plugging on.

I remind myself how much less laundry there is when he’s deployed or how I don’t have to share the TV remote, comfortable pillow, or ice cream. I think about venturing into vegetarian cooking while he’s not there to poke at the lentils and ask, “Um, where’s the meat?” 

It’s called coping.

Because even though I’m done, the deployment isn’t.

Not yet. Not even by a long shot.

So bring on my TV remote, veggie burger and big comfy pillow.

If I can’t be done, I might as well make the most of it.

Follow Brittany at www.brittsbeat.com

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