HandLing The Familiar
Our lives are constantly changing. People come in, and people go out. There are always births and deaths, weddings and funerals. Life changes fast, and the military makes sure of that. The age-old adage of “expect the unexpected” isn’t something many of us can actually prepare for.
Even with the “expected” things, we can find ourselves in a wildly different scenario than we thought. Every cycle that we face in military life is challenging in its own way. Some sail through the challenges gracefully, and others struggle every step of the way. Often, eliminating one challenge means discovering a whole new issue.
I’ve thought about this a lot with my husband’s upcoming deployment. It’s the same one we just said see you later to friends on. Some people will be gone for three months and others will be gone six. But the deployment is stateside and only a couple of hours away from home.
And I hear people write that off as not an actual deployment, and maybe it isn’t for them, but for those of us going through it, it will be very real. Even though our spouses are drivable, and we can probably see them, that doesn’t mean that this will be an easy deployment to navigate. I agree it is better than having our spouse overseas in active combat. A stateside deployment can eliminate a lot of the safety concerns. But for the spouse who is home, solo parenting, running a household, and figuring out a whole new way of life, I can assure you that the deployment feels very real.
As someone who has gone through a more “traditional” deployment, I have struggled to wrap my head around this concept. Yes, it is better, and I am well aware of that fact. Still, in many ways, it has done nothing to alleviate the responsibility of being the one who stays behind, all the while making it so that people are less likely to acknowledge the struggle. I say all this to say two things. First, if someone says something is hard, we should believe them. We don’t need to get into a contest arguing about who has it worse. We shouldn’t do it with our spouses during a deployment, and we certainly shouldn’t do it with each other. Life is hard enough without people reminding us that it could have been worse.
Second of all, and this is my bigger point today, everything is new, which means we don’t have to be prepared for it. My husband is leaving for his first TDY at this base later this week. He’ll be gone a little over a month, and once again, he’ll be close enough to come home on the weekends. I’ll be out of town half that time anyway, but he is once again missing our family trip to the beach. We are fortunate that it has taken this long to have a significant separation at the new base.
That being said, I haven’t necessarily been handling it well. It is less about the time apart and more about the fact that we have a full-blown toddler, and I am back working significantly more than we are used to. It just hit me that I will spend my first night alone in the new house. We are so lucky that it took almost eight months for that to happen, but it doesn’t make it easier when it does.
I was feeling very frustrated with myself for being upset about this separation. After all, we have done longer separations before. My husband missed the beach week last year, so I’ve spent a family vacation with just my son and me before. I’ve also solo parented for this length of time before. On the surface, there is nothing new about this TDY, and I was beating myself up because I was having a hard time with it.
I told my husband that I thought I would handle this better. After all, I’ve done it all before and as far as separations go, this really isn’t that bad. But he just told me, “You will, but you don’t have to handle it right now.” And he’s right. Honestly, that’s my process for these kinds of things. I do the majority of my freaking out and being upset before the separation actually happens, and then once it starts, I’m actually ok.
Even if that wasn’t how I did things, this is still a brand-new experience for us. It’s the first separation in a new place and a new house. I’ve never spent the night alone here before, so I haven’t figured out all of the security hacks I need to feel safe. I’ve solo parented before, but I did that nearly a year ago. I can guarantee there is a difference between parenting a 19-month-old and a seven-month-old. Both bring their own challenges, but I don’t necessarily have a blueprint for doing this solo parenting thing. And I’ve started this new aspect of my job, which has been incredible but also brought with it long, exhausting hours.
If you’re coming up on something that should feel familiar but feels like an unknown, cut yourself some slack. Life is changing constantly and the circumstance that something happened under before rarely appears in the same way again. Our support system, energy level, and responsibilities are continually shifting, so it’s ok if we need to take a minute to prepare. Life will go on, and the military will always press forward, but we can take the time to feel the full spectrum of emotions that come with the words “I have news.” And please don’t compare your struggle to anyone else’s. We never know the full scope of how someone is coping, and often, if we found ourselves in that same pair of shoes, we would feel the weight of the hardship. It is better to love and support one another through the obstacles thrown our way because we’ve all seen these hurdles before, even if they looked a little different when they crossed our paths.