April 21, 2022

 Kids,

This was part of a writing assignment for my favorite class. It's a couple of months old, but I wanted to share it here so that when you finally get old enough to read this thing, you can read it to glimpse a bit into my head space with Daddy gone again. Here it is, unedited:

How am I doing? It’s the simplest phrase yet filled with an overwhelming sense of complexity. In some ways, I’m doing “fine.” I’m feeding myself and my children. I live in a home which is slowly becoming what I hope it will be (we bought a fixer upper which is now almost completely “fixed up!”). I have a vehicle, which works, and gasoline and food in my refrigerator. My children will not go to sleep tonight wondering when their next meal will be. I have zero question about my husband’s deep and beautiful love for me. He offers me enormous grace, comfort, and support, something I treasure deeply after 20 years of togetherness. These gifts, these treasures, are not lost on me. I work hard to be grateful. I like to celebrate the good.

               Life isn’t always “good,” though, is it? We’ve been living the Army life for 21 years. My husband has served in every single Iraq War campaign, a distinction I have been told only 4 other active Army personnel have. I have sat by our closest friend, as she buried my husband’s best friend. I have heard so many 21-gun salutes, shed so many tears, I can’t even begin to quantify them all. We were supposed to retire. He was supposed to stay home, and we were supposed to be transitioning into life outside of the military telling us when we get days off, when we can go on vacation, where we will live… I come across as ungrateful. I realize this all too well. His military job has afforded us many benefits. But when he came home and told me he was moving to a new unit, and would be deploying in two weeks, because some stupid man has stupid ideas about destroying countries that are doing nothing to him… As I write this, tears fall. I am so.tired.of.war.

               School, all of a sudden, lost me. I am a passionate learner. I love reading and learning and diving in. I realize that sounds so lame in our society today, but it’s who I am. I enjoy hearing about people’s opinions and beliefs. I want to learn everything I can for as long as I can. I love being challenged and questioned. I am a perfectionist to the core, but I enjoy the journey of growth, genuinely. The week my husband left, I had to do an Art History assignment which forced me to look at the staged bodies of dead Civil War Soldiers. It was immensely traumatic. I found my heart overwhelmed with rage. I wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote the assignment for that activity a thousand times, editing out the curse words and vitriol that kept escaping. Timing is everything. I don’t believe in coincidences. That shit show happened, that week, for a reason. I feel no animosity towards my professor. How could she possibly have known, and I assume if I could have communicated the situation with her, she would have been abundantly merciful. I wasn’t mad at her. I was mad that in days I would be saying goodbye to my best friend because of fucking war.

               At the same time, I am navigating all of the emotions regarding my first family. I am unpacking the Mount Everests I have built up in my spirit, and I’m trying to begin the process of taking one foot and placing it in front of the other. In some ways, time feels like it slows. I feel acutely aware of the earth, the seasons, and the intensity. I simultaneously want to bury myself under a blanket and ignore it all, especially now with my husband gone. But again, timing is everything and all of this shit is rising up without him here, for a reason. At some point, one must learn how to navigate grief, rage, sorrow, and even forgiveness, on their own. But how do you forgive the monster that floods your dreams? How do you accept the devastation that’s been done? The only answer I can give is to write, talk, and share.

               I am grieved about the state of our country, our world, our planet. I am saddened by people feeling so angry over being asked to wear a mask for others. I am sad that selfishness is the language of the day. I feel sorrow that Native Americans have so much disregard. I feel grief that my husband and children are reduced to Indigenous imagery such as loving nature and being full of wisdom (side note: they do love nature and my husband, even my kids, has a lot of wisdom. The point is that they are not viewed as whole persons, rather as Indian characters). I feel sad when my daughter’s Cherokee status is dismissed and rejected because she has pale skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. I feel sorrow that we still live in a world that decides everything about you based on how you look, whether it’s true or not.

               I love to laugh. I love sitting down with a good friend, pouring out our hearts, challenging each other’s opinions, and laughing until my cheeks hurt. This is my idea of a beautiful moment. Today, however, it’s as if laughter has lost me. I feel so much sorrow. I have switched my focus to one hour at a time, and for some moments, one minute. I ask myself What can I do right now, this moment? What do I need to do for myself? The answer isn’t always the same. Self-care looks vague when you have deadlines and responsibilities. But nothing is permanent. This too shall pass…

Update.

 America,

It's been two months since America sent my favorite human being away. I don't think I would say I'm doing well. Times like these do not allow for wellness. One does not feel "well" when embarking on a marathon. Instead, the mind shifts to survival, endurance, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other... It's a constant fight to feel anything at all. There is so much pretending when one's husband is away. Our children need me to be "me." My husband needs me to keep everything running smoothly. My friends and family need me to fill the roles they've grown accustomed to. So I smile, I make a joke, I listen, I pretend. No one really wants to hear about the heartache, and even if they did, I don't know that I could muster up the energy or the confidence to define it. 

I am not disintegrating, but in every single moment of my day there is a hollowness that can not be erased or shared. There is no person on this earth who can help me process like he can. No one who understands what it's like to be in my head and my heart. There is no one who grasps the complicated set of feelings that I share regarding our daughter becoming an adult, our son's blindness and epilepsy, my own health issues, our other childrens' needs, our grief, our losses, our successes. He has seen me curled up in the fetal position screaming at God that HE CAN NOT TAKE THIS CHILD AWAY FROM ME and shutting down as my son lost his mind hours after my father died because of medication. He has seen me skinny and morbidly obese and every variation in between. He has held my hand while I cried and cried and he knows without any need for explanation that Mass is my safe place. Except he is also my safe place...

America, I miss him. I hope you understand that there are real families aching and sobbing this Father's Day away. I hope you grasp, when you read or talk about Ukraine or Russia or Europe, or anything war at all, that there is a real human being, with a real spouse, real children, real parents, on the other end of the grand statements of what we need to do. I hope you measure the cost and are willing for it to be you, your spouse, your child, your actual self. I don't pretend to know any answers, and I would not be so presumptive to think my voice holds any relevance on the subject of necessary (or unnecessary wars), I just ask for you to reflect on the ache, the cost, the hardship. It is more difficult than words could ever say. It hurts more than I could ever begin to describe to you. This year I will have celebrated our eighteenth anniversary, my fortieth birthday, our daughter's eighteenth birthday, our triplets' sixteenth birthdays, sicknesses, dog illnesses, major life transitions, all without him. That sucks.

Everything has a cost. Some days paying it really freaking sucks.

Letter to You

 It's Father's Day and we spoke for only a few minutes. There are moments in a marriage where one runs out of words. I miss the moments where touch could communicate everything I wanted to say to you. I miss not having to figure out the explosions in my mind, how to define them, and then releasing them from my mouth. I miss my heart racing, my pulse jumping, my breath catching, because you walked.in.the.door. I miss the way your eyes dance when you're laughing. I miss throwing my head back because you said or did something hilarious. I miss sitting next to each other on the couch. I miss feeling like our lives were moving forward. I hate living, while also being on pause. 

I'm tired.

Who are we in this next chapter? Who are we in this current one? Why does it all feel so confusing, boring, underwhelming, and overwhelming all at the same time? Why do I feel incapacitated, like I can't take a deep breath, because I don't get to see you every day? Why does love feel so unfair sometimes? Why am I so jealous of schools and hope and promise of the future? Who are we anymore, babe? What are we even doing here?

There was such a lengthy period of time where I could answer those questions with ease. Everything felt so clear and focused. I knew the point. I got the brief. We were in it to win it. Then I saw the shit show of the fallout. The decisions that have broken my heart into thousands of pieces and then poured salt in the gaping wounds. There are moments where I used to scream from the mountaintops, tell the stories as loudly as I could. I used to fight for the families, fight for the marriages, fight for the country to understand the reality behind it all. We are not the characters that are displayed on tv. We are so much more nuanced than that. I spent years fighting to make leaders understand what the experience was of the spouses and the kids, the girlfriends and the parents. I fought with all that I could to make everyone's voices heard. I fought until my heart was broken and bruised.

I want our children to understand that while the Army defines its backbone as the NCO, there's no soldier without their family. Period. There's no military fathers without the other half of the equation sitting back in America, while everyone barbeques, holding their crying children, putting on a happy face, hunkering down and just.getting.through.it. While simultaneously figuring out care packages, fighting to keep the connection alive via text, conversation, email, letter.

I'm so tired.

I feel so broken. I feel so drained. I feel exhausted and conflicted and unable to describe with any level of efficiency even the slightest element of how I feel. The minutes take forever to pass, and what has felt like a year has only been a couple of months. War is not for those who have seen too much of it. There's a necessary naivete. I feel angry when I hear people say We have to support this to save the world. I want to scream that they have exactly zero understanding of what that means, feels like, or looks like. Zero. I want to yell how easy it is to state when one's not sitting alone without their absolute favorite human being, for the seventh deployment, for the 102nd (and counting - adding in a separate tour, and not including training) month of sleepless, lonely nights. I'm the one sitting here trying to keep it all together waiting for the day when this current shit show will end and I will be able to take a deep breath and finally fall asleep.

I miss things making sense, then you get on facetime and I lay there staring at you, in the dark of our room, until the sound of your breath makes me fall asleep. I push my aching heart up against the imagination of what it feels like to be wrapped up in your embrace. I slow my breathing and go to the moments where you're hand is interlocked with mine, and everything feels simple and calm. I miss you.

 When we were young, our relationship was filled with emotional extremes. You and I were dramatic. We felt everything as if it was Mount Everest. We were big, bold, intense, passionate. We were all-in. When I reflect on the way I feel about this current deployment, I am surprised by the lack of extremes. This morning I woke up and ached for you, but it was not the ache that I would have expressed twenty years ago. It was deeper, slower, more quiet and still. I suppose I would describe it as more of a hollow sense. 

Last night as I lay in bed on the phone with you, we both went silent. You and I were drained from our very different experiences. Instead of filling the moments with words we just breathed. In that moment I closed my eyes and pretended that you were not on the other side of the planet. I pretended that this is not what it currently is. Maybe that's why I woke up feeling so hollow.

Since you have been gone, I have been struck by my difficulty to find words. Words are what I do, they're kind of my thing, and living these moments without you feels difficult to define. Gone are the extreme emotions that I have grown accustomed to in regards to deployment, here are these empty, drained, quiet ones that I don't particularly care for. What is there to say that has not already been said in spades?

You are my best friend. That phrase is thrown around so flippantly in our society, yet for me, it encompasses a degree of loyalty that is not common in our age. I have followed you, loved you, ached for you, supported you, and been united to you for so many years that I don't really know what the world without you means to me. Empty. 

I sit in Mass and struggle to even know what to pray. Normally, my heart and my brain are overwhelmed by communication. I often have to work hard to slow everything down and concentrate what is in front of me. Lately, it's silence. In an eerie way. I struggle to be present at all, though my body is sitting there. I feel disconnected and disengaged. I feel as if I have nothing to say. I find some solace that there are periods where silence is vital. 

Everything feels so different, Love. I don't recognize the world this way. So I sit in this quiet, feeling this sense of silence and hollowness. I wish we were together.

Anniversary

We celebrated our eighteenth wedding anniversary yesterday. He is one side of the planet; I am on the other. When I look up at the sky, he sees the moon and I see the sun. This time in our lives is unique to say the least. We have been together for so long that I cannot recall what or who I was before he arrived. When I reflect back on that period of my life, it is cloudy and vague. Not that he made my life begin, but more that it was a shadow, and a preparation, for what is now.

We have so many different opinions about war and the military in this country right now. I look at my fellow citizens and see people looking for heroes and villains. So much is painted as black and white, hard and easy, good and bad, fair and unfair, etc. I look at this deployment with both fresh eyes and the heart of someone who has walked this road an abundance of times. I feel simultaneously achy and sore, unwilling and broken, but also grateful. It's like the moments after something life changing occurs. Everything moves in slow motion. Your senses become more aware; your brain chemistry changes. You are present but also strangely removed, as if you are watching yourself navigate the world around you.

My Love is someone who can destroy me. His ambivalence, his distracted self, his focus on what is in front of him and lack of privacy to pour his heart out to me feels like the slow motion of lava flowing out of a volcano. It's a path of red hot, slow-moving energy that eats my sense of joy and leaves darkness in its wake. Writing that feels pathetic in our modern era of female power. I am my own individual. I am also his wife. There is no way to separate the two senses of myself. 

In the same light, I have moments of overwhelming grief, where the hardened lava of my heart breaks down and crumbles. I have moments where the most random situation will send me across the world to the side of the person who helps me to sleep, makes me laugh, and brightens up the darkness in my heart like no other person on this planet can. I want to be stronger than I feel. I want to be resilient and calm, pouring out peace on those around me. 

For eighteen years he and I have held hands and walked through the world with the same last name. We have navigated so many hardships that nearly ripped us to pieces. We have seen each other at our absolute worst and have helped each other achieve our best. We have fought like hell. We have laughed even harder. We have loved with fists closed so tight around our own will and determination to survive. We have no illusions that disintegration is around every corner. Marriage is hard... but it can be such a beautiful joy, a delight to the soul. It can keep you going when the lava seeks to turn you to stone. 

May God give us strength to weather this time apart. 

Ache

 Last night I couldn't sleep. I laid in bed for hours, waiting for the night to tick away. The physical element of your absence is immense. My body aches for yours to be next to me. It lays awake, waiting for the feel of you to lull it to sleep and there are moments where it just isn't possible to ignore it. I was exhausted, but my soul was aching and searching for what I knew would not arrive.

Sometimes I feel hollow, love. I wonder what the purpose is to my days. I am probably far too wrapped up in you, yet I am not apologetic about it. My days are divided by the presence and absence of you. When you are gone there is no division. Hours, days, weeks, months blur together in a giant glob of relentless ache. I feel incomplete. What will I do when you die? 

War is a young man's game. It's a phrase that I've heard you say recently. I relate so deeply. I observe and see how this is playing out and find myself saying so many times I'm too old for this. Even with that perspective, I'm simultaneously grateful. Missing you, longing for you, recognizing the great contribution that you bring to my heart and my days is a privilege that is not lost on me. Too many people get lost in the monotony of marriage and they lose track of the way that love is like wind. Powerful, life changing, impossible to define beyond its impact on the world. You are my wind. You move me, sway me, impact me, yet I can't see you. You hold me prisoner when I'm lying awake waiting for the hours to tick away and the day to come. 

I miss you.

Seven

Marriage is a process of habitualization. It’s small actions, happening every day, until they are so engrained in you that you don’t recognize their existence at all, until they’re gone. Marriage is presented as non-habit-forming, but time and years have shown that to be a lie. I am an addict, I am HIS addict, and here I sit without him.

The Army comes with all sorts of degrees of challenges and heartaches. It has served up, on a platter, multiple instances of ripping my most prized relationship away from me, leaving me sobbing, aching, empty. It has forced me to unwrap my fingers from his, my arms from his, my sleep, my laughter, our moments from him and in its wake is a hollowness that is damned near impossible to define.

Lucky number seven came with all of its fury. It came in an unexpected manner, yet its wound is no less significant. The scars from the previous six are etched across my mind and body. My soul moves with the bumps of their presence, reminding me that nothing is permanent, everything changes, this too will one day end. Cherish every single second.

Never take the moments where they hold your hand for granted. Don’t stop celebrating that they make you coffee every morning, or wrap themselves around you when you are cold. Don’t stop being grateful that they always put the toilet seat down, or stop delighting in the way they sound just before they fall asleep. Never take for granted how much you enjoy folding their laundry and putting away their shoes for the umpteenth time. Never stop noticing how your flesh was made to perfectly mold into them, and how in that embrace you fall asleep every.single.time. Never stop falling apart in their presence, or believing them when they tell you that you are capable and strong and good. Never take a single moment for granted because it’s the habits, the every day moments, that rip you to shreds when the ghost of them is all you have to hold on to.

He is my heartbeat. Unwrapping my arms from him hurts like hell.