Some deployments, I’m determined. I have projects. I know we’ll get stuff done. We’ll do home improvements and learn things.
Some deployments I’m happy, believe it or not. Fun things keep me busy, and I don’t have much time to e-mail and dwell.
Some deployments I’m serious. Worried about bills and broken appliances. Wondering about our child’s education.
Some deployments I’m sad. Watching our child take her first steps without him. Reading how hard it is for him in between the words in his email. Upset he’s missing another birthday.
But, for the first time ever, this deployment, I’m lonely.
Now, granted, every time he’s gone, I have nights or days of loneliness.
But it goes away. It’s not constant. It’s a moment. A few hours. An evening.
Not this time.
It’s likely that he left me with a newborn only hours old, amid the entire holiday season. With things I had to take care of that aren’t exactly easy with a sore body and three little ones.
It’s a lot of work, a lot of which is out of my control.
And whenever all the kids are in bed, and I am tired and sitting down to write him an email, I feel it.
That really quiet, helpless, grieving loneliness.
I watch Modern Family without him and feel it. I buy Christmas presents for his parents, and I feel it. I lose my temper juggling three kids and dinner and our pets and a water softener that broke and, unbeknownst to me, caused us to have a water bill three times higher than normal. And I feel it.
This is a lonely deployment. A mix of love and sadness and numbness.
It’s that moment when you think this deployment is flying, only to look up and realize it’s only been two long, slow, boring days without a word.
But all the time. You’re alone. Fighting back tears.
A lot of times you’re shut down so as to not feel the general crappiness brought about by depressive loneliness.
It’s not fun or glamorous. It’s mundane.
I have had longer, harder, more calamitous deployments. I really have.
But this one is emotionally tough for me in a way I’m not familiar with.
Luckily, it won’t last forever. Just another blip on our Navy journey. A “Remember that one patrol you left on right after the baby was born?” piece of the puzzle.
It won’t matter in the future.
But for now, I’m still lonely.
