Reminders of him are everywhere.

Half an onion in the fridge from when he made us breakfast sandwiches out of eggs fried in onion rings.

A faded old t-shirt he forgot in the laundry.

His toothpaste, unwittingly abandoned, peeking out from behind a bottle of lavender essential oil and my satin mint facial scrub.

Honey sticks he purchased at a quirky gas station in a small mountain town still in the snack basket.

Little pieces of our life together, scattered throughout our home. Part of me wants to scrub them away, try to quell the memories so the next however many months go by a bit more quickly. The other part wants to keep them all, pretend like he’s just out at the grocery store, imagine everything is normal.

Amazingly, throughout our five years in the Marine Corps, he never had a typical months-long deployment. It was traded for years of constant training and travel and time in the field, and he missed most of our son’s first two years of life, but there was no official deployment.

Then an ankle injury which forced him out, a move to Colorado and another one back to the east coast, and finally a new job…that involves a whole lot of deployments. Yep, the reason we were able to move back to Colorado is because Hubby now has a fully deployed position that allows us to live anywhere.

For all of you that can barely keep up with our family–I can barely keep up with us either. Here’s the update:

We moved back to Colorado for as long as God allows it, bought our dream mountain lot, husband deployed while I stay back with our three kids at my parents’ house, and I’ll be acting as the general contractor along with a trusted GC friend to build our house while husband is away. We’re looking at maybe 18-24 months as our timeline for the build, and hubby will be on deployment cycles for as long as he has this job.

Thankfully, building a home is time consuming and so very distracting, so it should pass the time quickly.

But in the meantime, I sit here unsure of what to do with myself.

Maybe if I don’t think about it, it will go away. Then again, probably not. Has my baby been crying all morning because he senses the difference, or is something else going on? At what point will my two year old daughter realize daddy isn’t just at work for the day, and it’s been a really, really long time since she’s seen him?

How do I balance moving on with keeping him a part of our lives?

Moving on sounds dramatic, I know, and that’s not what I mean, but we can’t spend half a year doing nothing but waiting. So I do my best to juggle. Juggle bed times and snacks and snuggles and homeschooling and potty training and legos and remembering to bathe them in the midst of it. Juggle keeping daddy a part of their lives without reminding them he’s not here. Juggle building our own routines but maintaining flexibility so dad fits in when he comes back home. Juggle loving little people here and my big person there.

And sometimes in juggling, we drop the ball, and so it’s important to figure out what balls to drop. An analogy I heard recently is we have glass balls that shatter when we drop them and plastic balls that fall but bounce and they’re okay. Prioritize the glass balls.

And I’ve realized that keeping my husband involved, even when he’s not home, is a glass ball. Bed times are glass. The lego ball is plastic. Potty training is bamboo–I wouldn’t want to drop it but it would probably survive if I did.

While part of me wants to throw away the onion half, and hide the forgotten laundry, and get rid of the toothpaste, my husband still lives here. My tendency is to wipe away all traces so I think about it less and don’t miss him as much, but becoming 100% independent, while easier, isn’t good for me because I leave no place for him when he returns.

Saving my husband’s place is a glass ball.

And it will hurt for awhile because when you need somebody who’s gone, there’s a hole. And instead of filling my husband’s hole with my own self-sufficiencies and independence, as I am wont to do, I am going to leave the hole empty.

Because nothing can fill that hole except for my husband.

So, yes, reminders of him are everywhere. I’ll share the honey sticks with my kids, and let them know they’re from their daddy. I’ll put that faded old t-shirt back in my closet for the kids to wear if they’re sad. I’ll make good of the forgotten toothpaste (good thing, too, because I’ve run out of mine). And I will make another one of those delicious egg in onion sandwiches and remember slow breakfasts with my husband.

Just half a year.