Finding Free Time in the Sustainment Phase
Chasing a dream during the sustainment stage may actually be the simplest time to do it. Life feels relatively normal during this time. We have settled into our routines. And even though they probably look very different than they do when our spouses are home, they work for us. We know where we need to be on any given day. We know who needs to do what. We know when things need to be done. We’ve got a rhythm of life that makes room for hard days and factors in rewards for doing hard things. That’s how life should be.
And often, that is how life is when our spouse is home. Of course, we go through hard times. We go through periods of stress, but our lives factor in times of relief and relaxation. My husband and I have been stressed while waiting to find out our orders, and he is preparing for a few final evals in the coming days. It has been stressful around here, but we have a vacation to Ireland planned in the coming months that will just be the two of us. We will factor in other times of stress relief during the interim, but our life has naturally factored in times of ease to cope with periods of stress.
When we have this level of balance in our lives, it doesn’t mean that everything is equally portioned out. It just means that things start to balance when we look at our life overall. Maybe we have to look at six months, one year or five years to see the balance, but we get exactly what we were looking for over time. However, if we look at our life on any given day, week or month, it will often look very off-balance. But we get to use that to our advantage.
This time, when we are out of balance during a deployment, is the perfect time to chase a dream. We still have responsibilities at home. We still have plants, pets and children to care for. We can’t ignore everything else in our lives, but we can tip the scales towards our dreams. Let’s say that the current deployment is nine months long. In the first month or so, we figure out our life. The last month throws everything off course again. That leaves seven months in the middle, where we can go all in on our dreams because as much as our responsibilities increase without a partner to split the duties, we don’t have many responsibilities that naturally come with having a partner. So, let’s talk about what “free” time we have when our spouse is deployed.
1. Evenings
When my husband is deployed, I don’t spend my evenings doing the same things I would if he was home. I still cook dinner and watch some TV, but often, the TV is more background noise to keep the house from feeling too quiet. Even if it is on, I am often in another room working on something else. I don’t spend nearly as much time vegging out on the sofa watching because, honestly, it feels emptier to me when I can’t snuggle with my husband at the same time. I still have to clean up the kitchen and get my son ready for bed, but after he goes to sleep, I am more likely to work on something or go to bed early than to spend hours watching a show that I’m really not very invested in.
2. Bedtime
My personal bedtime routine is a lot shorter when my husband is away. “Going to bed” when he is gone simply means putting on one of his t-shirts, washing my face, brushing my teeth and crawling into bed. I tend to spend more time scrolling Instagram than I would if he was home, but overall, my routine is quicker than if I were doing everything that a usual nightly routine meant with my husband.
3. Date Nights
We haven’t been nearly as great about date nights since having our son, but we were pretty consistent before that. During the first deployment, I didn’t have the pull to do an activity with my husband rather than go out with friends. Checking out a new restaurant or seeing a movie would be things that I would usually save until my husband and I could go together. But when he was deployed, I took the opportunity to do those things with friends or skip them if I didn’t want to go alone.
4. Weekends
In my house, the time off work is sacred. I don’t usually do much work over the weekends because my husband is home, and I want us to spend time as a family. Whether we travel, go on local adventures or stay at home cleaning up the house, we try to keep as much of that time together as we can. This is also when we make room to host friends, which doesn’t happen nearly as much during deployment (most of our friends right now are in my husband’s squadron, so when he deploys, they do, too).
5. Holidays
I still travel home for the holidays and celebrate as best I can, but everyone handles this differently. A lot of it depends on how close we are to extended family, how special the holiday feels to us, and the timing of the deployment altogether. My husband didn’t miss many holidays while he was gone. He missed Halloween (which isn’t something I get super invested in, to begin with, so I spent it in Aruba), Thanksgiving (the second time he’s missed it and his favorite holiday) and my birthday. He was home in time for Christmas, which would have been my most challenging day to spend without him. While I spent all those events with family while he was gone, I could have just as easily done them alone or let the day pass by altogether. I didn’t have the stress of planning, hosting or prepping for any of these events.
I want to be very clear, though: having more time does not mean that we put our marriages on the back burner. During our deployment, my husband and I talked twice a day. Sometimes, our conversations were very short; other times, they lasted over an hour. We texted constantly when our awake hours lined up. Our marriage did not suffer because we were missing out on date nights.
I’m not at all saying that our communication strategy should be what you should pursue. Do what works best for your marriage. I know plenty of people who have planned date nights over FaceTime with a special meal, game or show to watch. That just wasn’t my style, and something like that would’ve made the gap feel wider for me.
All I am saying is that there are probably things in our lives that we made time for when our spouses were home that we don’t need to make time for now. Using that extra time is a choice, though. It is very easy to let that time slip away and get caught up in surviving, just trying to make it through one more day. It is so easy to spend that time scrolling Instagram or watching reruns. We can use that time to serve our dreams, though. That time will go away once our spouses return home, and I don’t know about you, but I’d like to say that I genuinely used that time for the things I am passionate about.