The Big D: Life Has To Go On

02 June
It's a new month! It's always kind of a big deal for me to turn the page on the calendar during these times of seemingly endless waiting.

June promises to be a busy month for me. My husband made me promise we would stay active and busy and we are but I'm learning another difficult lesson as I get into summer and that is: if I want to enjoy the things we've always done together while my husband is away, I'm going to have to learn to do some things without him. That leaves me torn because there is a little piece of me that thinks I am not allowed to have fun in his absence and he is not allowed to have fun in my absence (little rabbit trail...near the end of AIT the movers came to pack up our stuff. So my already bleak existence--sharing a room at my parent's house with my three kids while 90% of my stuff was in storage--was even bleaker. My sister took the kids for the night so I didn't have them underfoot during the packing and I found myself in bed after a long day, all alone, with a pathetic little bowl of popcorn in my lap that was my dinner. My husband picked that precise, miserable moment to text me to say that FTX was over and he went to Fago De Chao in downtown San Antonio in his dress blues with his buddies to celebrate and it was sooooo wonderful and amazing and he gorged himself himself on 7 different kinds of meat and had sooooo much fun. So I did what women do and felt sorry for myself and got mad at him for having fun while I was miserable and engaged in an ugly text fight. Not my proudest moment. I admit with equal parts shame and pride that I texted him back 20 minutes later, apologetic, and telling him he had my permission to blame this all on my "time of the month," which was partly true. ).

Now I find myself, after receiving an invitation and talking it over with my husband, having agreed to drive down to Florida later this month to meet friends and go camping. Gulp. I've never even thought about attempting camping without my husband (who earned his Eagle Scout at 16, btw, and can do anything camping related). I'm even raising the stakes by renting a pop-up from the MWR (something we always talked about doing together). I'm slightly scared to death to pull that thing for 354 miles alone but my friend's husband has been informed that it will be his job to back it into the campsite once I get there. It kills me to think of doing this without my husband. He would really enjoy this trip.

I'm going to pour a little more salt in his wounds while I'm there and go to a Tampa Bay Rays game because our Kansas City Royals are in town. Correction--HIS Kansas City Royals. Not mine. I'm a fan only because he is (one of our first dates was the cheap seats at a Royals game ).

 And I'm the one who gets to see them play in Florida. He will be sitting in the back of a first aid truck in the middle of a 15 hour shift, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the desert, waiting for someone to need him and his medic bag while I am proudly wearing my jersey that he got me for our first Christmas together, eating peanuts and ducking pop-flies. It just doesn't seem fair.

THIS is the hard part of being an Army wife, I think. Missing them when you're bored and lonely and miserable is one thing. But missing them when you're out there, living a life you are supposed to be living together is a special kind of torture. But I will do my best to have fun with my friend and her family. I will take lots of pictures and tell him how I wished he was there every second and it will be true and he will believe me. And he may secretly want me to be as miserable as he is but he would never say it out loud. I wouldn't hold it against him anyway--I would be a hypocrite if I did. So I will soften the blow by telling him how much better the trip would have been if he was there, and how we'll do it again next summer when he is home. What else can an Army wife do? She still has to live, as weird as it feels to be doing it without her soldier.