Long Times Apart

I've been forced to think about spending extended periods of time away from my chosen partner in life so much more than I thought I would in an ordinary, committed relationship.

As a military spouse, it's not just deployments we deal with. Sometimes it's weeks of twelve hour shifts, or spouses switched to odd shifts, other times it's trainings at far away bases for 2, 3, or 6 weeks.

Recently, a marine was upset that, just after a 7 month deployment away from his baby, he was going to have to "deploy" for 3 weeks to another base. I said, "you mean TDY?" He said, "what's a TDY?" If the different branches have different ideas about what their job descriptions are, how are we supposed to understand how to support each other? Do the various branches really want to support each other? I hear lip service to support in public, good natured ribbing of each other, and then I hear muted grumblings about each other under their breath. Perhaps we don't understand each other like I thought.

My Application for Sainthood

Tomorrow I'm going to tell everyone how I find my Zen after feeling awful.

Today I'm going to tell you how I don't.

I probably went over my cell phone minutes by about an hour the day that my neighbor said she didn't want to hang around me because she felt like I was competing with her. I walked about 15 miles and talked to my mother on my cell phone for a lot of that time.

Later, I cried and yelled at my husband. I blamed him for putting me where I was and trapping me with these awful women on base. I blamed him for not making more money and for not finding us more happy couples and families to be friends with.

After all that unhealthy behavior (well, the walking might have been healthy), I started to deal with things a better way....