The minutes are ticking away until he leaves again. Again. Didn’t he just get home?
Yesterday afternoon, after two weeks of much needed vacation as a family, my husband called one of his buddies to ask what time they needed to be in at work the next morning. Less than a minute into the conversation, I heard a change in his voice.
“Monday?” he asked, groaning.
My stomach dropped. Sometimes, my husband looks at his phone and groans and then it turns out to be something silly like he lost the game he was playing or he is reminded of PT early the next morning. This time, however, I knew it was different.
He hung up the phone and his head dropped. “We leave Monday at 0530,” he said quietly.
Monday morning? That was less than 36 hours away. We were supposed to have time–more than a week at least. I gulped and nodded as the words slowly sunk in. It was time for another goodbye, this one for more than two months. In fact, we have no idea the next time we’ll live together; it might not be until late fall. I could have sworn he just got home from the last long training exercise.
36 hours means one and a half days of complete chaos as he will be at work late into the evening preparing and then come home and spend the rest of the night packing. The sun will go down over gear strewn all over the living room and the hardwoods will disappear under cammies and flak jackets and empty magazines as the night turns into a mad rush to fit an entire room worth of gear into three bags. There will be laundry to do and extra shampoo to be bought and love notes to be stuck in pockets in hopes they will be found during the miserable nights in suffocating desert heat. Tonight is our last night together for many, many nights and it’s long past dinner time, yet I haven’t even heard that he’s on his way home. It was supposed to be date night–we had a wonderful evening planned at a cute cafe on the beach–but the military had other ideas.
The military always has other ideas.
Everyone keeps telling me that will be get easier, and they’re right–but it is by no means becoming easy. Slowly, we are getting used to the whirlwind goodbyes, and now it does hurt less than it did two years ago, but it’s still hard to begin the drive home after the bus finally pulls out the the parking lot. The military is taking away my husband again, as we knew would happen when he enlisted.
My husband and I have been together for seven years now, and we’ve been apart for 40 months out of that time. That’s 3.33 years, in case you’re interested–half the time we’ve known each other.
0530 on Monday morning came and went and began another four months apart, meaning that I will have spent more than half the time I’ve loved him loving him afar. I guess you could say that our missionary kid upbringing prepared us for this life as all throughout our high school years we would spend months apart during summer and Christmas school holidays–me in Malaysia, him in Indonesia.
The moment finally arrived and I kissed him goodbye, scooped our toddler up in my arms, and drove away without looking back.
This time there were no tears–I guess it really is getting easier. My 14 month old little boy has had his share of tears though, today. It’s probably harder for him than for me because his misses his daddy yet he has no idea where he’s gone and why he’s not coming home, and he stares in confusion at pictures on the wall. This morning he toddled into my husband’s office and pulled a picture of him and his daddy off the shelf and brought it to me. All I can do is snuggle him, tell him Daddy will be home soon, and play the songs and stories we recorded last night on my phone since for the next few months Daddy will not be around for bed times.
It’s now been 15 hours since we said goodbye and I swing between feeling crazy motivated and rushing like a whirlwind around the house tidying up from the night of packing and a child who never stops moving and feeling totally lethargic and like there’s nothing in life worth doing except sitting in front of America’s Got Talent with a pint of ice cream and tissues, which incidentally is exactly what I will be doing in eight minutes when it hits 8:00pm.
Yes, there will be ice cream, but I probably won’t cry much–I guess after seventeen goodbyes for weeks or months at a time we’re at the point where eyes are dry and my heart has sunk just a little less. Our first goodbye was for six months just a few days after we met and now it’s eight years later for a few more months with two and a half years of marriage and a toddler under our belt. It’s not easy by any means to be away from my best friend again but we’re going to be okay. We always are.