Luckily it was not a crazy hour in the morning, instead it was mid afternoon. But that does not mean we did not start the day off early, after all we did have a lot of stuff we needed to still get done before he left.
My husband is awake. I am half awake but trying to fall back asleep hoping that I was dreaming. It is the day after our family wedding we had, husbands are not supposed to leave the very next day. It is all I can think about, and my mind won’t stop wondering of what will happen. It is the day after our family wedding….he shouldn’t be leaving.
I walk into the living room and there he sits, just sitting on the couch trying to figure out what is left to do, if he forgot to pack anything. And god-forbid if he did we had went over his checklists a good five times. He grabs something to eat real quick and I cannot help but think this is the last time he will eat in our home for a very long time. The last “home-cook” meal he will have.
He’s leaving…yet again……but this time it is not the same, no for this time it is farther away and much much longer. His sea bags that I very rarely see sit at the bottom of our staircase. He’s dressed in cammies; I am dressed in sweat pants and a t-shirt. Totally not a great outfit for a military goodbye. I also hate goodbyes, I really do.
Luckily the tears were nowhere to be seen in my eyes. I am trying my hardest to keep it together but inside I am really dying. My mind keeps going back to all the things I will miss the most during this deployment. Adventures and time that are dear to my heart. I’ll miss him without a doubt. I will miss the time that we could of had together if it wasn’t for the gosh darn military.
I swear it’s a love hate relationship when it comes to the military. And the thing is, that night when I go to sleep, there will be no one to snuggle with, to chit-chat with, to mess with.
When I wake up, I will be waking up to the sun-shining through my window. There will be no more unholy early morning 3:00 am wake ups. Every day there will be no one to cook for except myself, so why even cook?
When I want to chitchat with my best friend, my husband I will not be able to. And who knows when the next time will be that I can actually talk to him. It could be days, it could be weeks, it could even be months. I would be one of the lucky ones if I actually got to talk to him while he is deployed.
When everything starts to break and fall apart in the house at the worse timing possible, I need my partner in crime to fix it. And yes this does happen ONLY during deployment times.
And now the time has come that I have been dreading. He is finished his breakfast and his sea bags are packed and we both know he has to go soon, but we still have stuff we need to get sone. We have to head to the bank to complete our POA before he goes. This deployment, I will be watching that bus drive away in the dead of night, we are saying goodbye in the parking lot of a hangar on base. A hangar that I use to drive by and drop him off near for him to be just gone for a week or two…but this time….this time it will be much much longer.
He throws his bags in line with all the others. We chit-chat with others and then it is time. It is time for him to go. He tells me, “I love you. I’ll see you soon.” We brought the dog with us, and he says good-bye to his favorite friend. At this point all I can say is “I love you”. I just watch him turn around and go to formation. I hope he knows and understands how truly loved and appreciated he is.
Eventually I head home. Heading towards the bedroom I look over and notice his clothes piled up on the floor. He always leaves his clothes on the floor. I always have a talk with him about leaving them there since we have a fully functional hamper. Sometimes I think about how it is so irritating that my husband does not listen most of the time. Sometimes it can be the most frustrating thing ever.
I realize what I will really miss…
Everyday. Everyday normal life. The obnoxiousness. The irritating. The loving. The annoying. The adventures. The Journeys. All of us together. All of him.
Eventually I will even miss his clothes piled up on the floors as much as it irritates me. I will miss him waking me up every morning before he leaves to go to work with a kiss or the fifty alarms that he set the night before to make sure he wakes up on time…even though he won’t. I will miss him playing with our dog every night, even if he does cause him to be full of energy. I will even miss his military gear exploding all over the house and out-of-place, well honestly maybe not…after all I do really despise his gear when he takes it all out for packing and checklists.
In every deployment, you miss your normal days. The normal everyday life is what makes life, well life. And the thing is you truly do not know if you may have experienced your last day of “everyday life” with your spouse. But we all have to think that it is not over yet.
One day I will see my husband again. He will return home and our family will be back to being whole again. We will be back to our old ways of irritating the shit out of each other. Then life will continue to go on as if he never missed days, weeks, months, even years away from home. And this I wouldn’t change.
And in the end, he did come home to me and Zero.
