All Gave Some

Today is September 11, 2013.  9/11/13.  9/11.....a day that comes to the minds of millions around the world as a day of destruction, hate, and death.  In 2001, the Best Country in the World felt incredible pain as a whole, the only time I, in my 30+ years, have seen.  

People hugged tighter in the grocery stores.  Coffee clutchers had all they could do to pour over newspapers.  Everyone shook their head.  No one seemed to know how to feel about it, much less how to process it.  We all knew it would engage a full on war.  It really had to; there wasn’t much of a choice for anything else.

A few years after 9/11, my husband told me he was thinking about joining the service.  It was a simple statement in our tiny dining room, where he had been Googling enlistment procedures. 

In the dozen years we had been together up until this point, it was the first time I ever heard him talk about the military.  Within 48 hours, a recruiter knocked on my front door, and I watched my husband, the father of my 2 children, sign on the dotted line.  I heard this desire to enlist in the service happened often after times such as 9/11; the wrong doings of some people in this world simply urged others to do something about it.

As my husband signed his life away, our life away, my oldest daughter, a toddler then, told me she didn’t like the recruiter because “he had Dr. Phil shoes on.”.  He scared her and she had no idea why.  I held our youngest on my hip as we kind of just hung out/ hid in the background, listening to the conversation.  As a family, we were never asked if it would be okay, I was never asked if I thought I could or wanted to handle the duties of single parenting while my husband went off to do whatever he had to do.  The kids or I weren’t consulted at all if we thought it was a good idea, or if we agreed to it.
He signed as the recruiter came to find me and said, “Don’t worry, he’ll never see sand.  At least not for 2 years.”

I had a range of emotions those days.  I was scared and unsure.  We were by then already in war with Iraq and I didn’t know a single thing about the military or being a military wife.  It was a foreign entity to me, completely.  I didn’t grow up in the military, I had no desire to be in the military myself, and I thought my husband didn’t either.  

To be honest, I was a little pissed off.  Our lives were happily, I thought, on the path we were steering down together.  And I thought he liked the drive.  But now he just jacked the wheel from my hands and completely and totally derailed our trip, our plans, our life, with absolutely no regard to us, as a family.

I was proud.  Or I wanted to be.  Immediately after his enlistment, I remember wanting to be proud but not knowing how to be proud.  It was all just so new to me.  It felt like I myself was dropped off in a foreign land with my babies and had to learn how to speak the language, how to survive.  My family unit depended on it.

If I can be self appreciatve for a minute, I’d explain to you that I know full well the beauty of me is I can pull myself up by my bootstraps, mentally and emotionally, better than most.  So a few days into my husband’s enlistment, I knew this was indeed happening, and I better dive in and get used to it and make the best out of it.  And with that, I found myself surprisingly proud to be thrust into a military life, like it or not.

Those first days away my husband had, the whole reserve training “one weekend a month, 2 weeks a year” are now comical to me in hindsight.  His first weekend away, my God, I cried like a baby.  2 days.  2 frickin days!!  I could barely handle it.  He trained less than 150 miles away from our home.  The kids and I holed up in the house and I just could feel myself shrivel up inside myself, as if I was a cartoonish starving figure; cheeks and soul shrinking to a skeletal resemblence.  When he returned home that first Sunday evening, the kids ran to him out on the sidewalk, I ran to him; he was home!  I didn’t think I could handle it, but I bit my lip and raised my chin and dealt.  It was what I did now.

Time passed.  Training weekends passed.  His ‘2 weeks’ came and went.  Twice.

2 years had gone by, actually not quite; one year and 11 months passed, and he got a phone call to prepare and pack his bags.  He’d be deployed to Iraq within the month, leaving right after New Year’s.

Now, I had feelings I knew how to name.  I was pissed at that fucking recruiter.  He promised me 2 years of untouchableness.  He lied.  Not to say I wasn’t surprised.  I wasn’t at all.  I knew my husband would be deployed.  I wanted to be proved wrong though.
When I saw Mr. Recruiter Man at the ‘Family Farewell”  day at base, I had all I could do not to lash out.  As luck would have it, I didn’t have to.  He walked in the door and families surrounded him like it was a midnight lynching.  I obviously wasn’t the only one he made a ‘promise’ to.  I focused on sitting next to my husband.

I was terrified and still SO unsure.  I questioned the tangeable things that pertained to our daily lives.  How would I hear from him, if at all?  What if I need to reach him?  How long would he be gone?  How would the bills get paid?  Upon enlistment, I questioned, “how am I going to do this?”.  Now, upon deployment, I didn’t dare question anything of the like.  I didn’t have the energy or the mental strength to do so because if the answers were anything other than a story book answer, I didn’t think I’d survive that realization.

He deployed and off he went.  To encapsulate our feelings, how our daughters cried thousands of misunderstanding tears over the nights, to explain our days....it’s impossible.  I trudged on, day by day, finding recognizeable normalcy in routines, and because I did, my children did as well.  It didn’t take long before his family turned on us.  They never wrote to him.  They judged me.  They stuck noses in where they did not belong, and they offered help only with shady strings attached.  I had a moment of utter exhaustion with them, crying to the point of vomiting over the entire ‘why meeeee?’ feeling.  My kids saw that.  They heard his sister call me bad names and they couldn’t know why.  And then?  After that day?  I stopped.

I stopped talking to them, stopped wishing I had them to depend on, and started depending on my family only.  When he finally called and had time to talk, the flood gates opened and I was able to share my difficulties and concerns finally with the man I married.  “Don’t worry ‘bout it.” 

That was it.  No overly concerned reaction, not one I would’ve like anyway.  No questions.  So, I chalked it up to not me overreacting, but him having bigger things to concentrate on.  He was the one who was deployed afterall.  I had no way of knowing his inner most fears and daily life.  I asked, but he stopped sharing.  So I started to slowly depend on no one, but me.  Oh hello, there you are, bootstraps.  I left anyone who wasn’t in my life as a support in the dust and forged on.  Talk about military life.  I had it all along.  I just wasn’t enlisted in it.

Nearly a year had gone by before he came home.  In that time, my mother, who I had a perfect relationship with, died in front of my eyes.  I developed a small addiction to Ambian.  I gained 40 lbs and kicked the pills to the curb.  Not only did I write several letters a week to him, ever week, I also learned the names of those in his unit and wrote to them.  I celebrated my 10th wedding anniversary alone.  I celebrated my birthday alone.  I threw myself into volunteering and made sure I was there when the kids needed a hug or a laugh.  I didn’t need, nor want anyone else responsible for any of it; it would be me who made sure they had it.  I threw birthday parties and summer parties and paid bills and watched the kids grow almost a foot each.

The high of a soldier returning home is uncomparable to another feeling that I know of.  Leading up to the final day of welcoming home, my life was abuzz.  Cleaning the house more than usual, planning for family downtime, prepping the kids....and fielding calls.  I hated the calls more than anything.  Friends and family calling to express how excited they were for us, I loved.  The calls from his family, some 10 months later, NOW offering to be there for us, I had absolutely no time for.  I refused any help they offered by this point, and trust me, it wasn’t often they offered anyway.  

The worst calls I took were ones from well meaning (?) Ombudsmen within his unit, the specific man or one of his office helpers who were there ‘to help me’.  This was the first time I had heard from them.  Ever.  They never reached out.  They never called before.  They never gave any kind of information they promised.  They did call days before he returned home to tell me, and I swear on this, not to upset him so he wouldn’t kill me.

“Don’t do anything, like, mow the lawn....let him be the man.  You’ve handled everything this past year, now don’t.  And hopefully he won’t, like, jump out and stab you in a flashback.”

Swear.  To.  God.

After the 4th or 5th call like this over the course of a few days, I stopped answering the phone.  I told them to stop calling me.  I was gaining fondness for my bootstraps by this time I guess you could say.

Things seemed normal when he came home.  He had seen death and carnage.  He had lost friends.  He was on some disabilty.  Slowly, a new personality did start to emerge.  He began to relish his time away from his family and really enjoyed his time with the military.  For me tho, that was still something to be proud of.  I thought things had transitioned well.

You can rationalize anything, when you want to.

Word came about a second deployment.  I had no doubt we could handle this one.  We’d be fine.  Nothing new.  I felt I was now, fully, a military wife, and I was perfectly okay with that.  Again, leaving around the next holiday season, the kids a little bit older, we sent him off amid the same prayers and hoped everything would return to normal when he came home. 

There was a significant change in our personalities; personally mine was one of renewed faith in myself, a “I can do it all” attitude, and I don’t think either one of us anticipated the full effect that tide would create within our relationship.  It was going to be simply not a year of riding the waves with this deployment, I knew I could steer the ship.  The more I swung out of being that woman who cried over the first weekend of training, to the woman who much more easily forged on, the more he tugged back trying to regain control.  I think he missed the woman crying, the woman huddled inside, the woman waiting for him to come back.  He was being taught day in and day out how to succumb to the military lifestyle, I was flat out told we did not come first anymore.  I was proud, yes, but my problem was, when I started to not be okay with that part of it.  If I was expected to compartmentalize for the sake of our lives, why wasn't he?

Mid deployment, this time to several countries as a humanatarian mission, the shift within our marriage became  a thing of continental drift porportion.  I didn’t need nor taking sleeping pills, because I slept well.  I taught the kids about their own tiny glittery boot straps.  He was in considerable less danger on this deployment.  I had to weather the storm of missing my husband, as a school or some bungalows were built up in Haiti with the corner stones of my marriage.  I still had ups and downs.  But they were lesser.  Or I made the mistake of believing they were of lesser importance.

People who know me, people who followed our demise with tubs of extra buttered popcorn like it was the billion dollar blockbuster of the week, know our story.  They know my side.  They know my opinion of what went down (and I say opinion only because if you were to ask him, he’d surely tell you something different.  At least, he used to.)  The cheating that came, the abuse, the secret nature that our relationship turned into....it’s not even blog worthy, more like novel worthy.  I could literally fill a book.  

Funny how you rationalize.  Maybe it’s a woman thing.  Maybe it’s a mother thing, or a wife thing.  I think it’s a human thing.  I rationalized everything for awhile.  He had been through so much after all.  We both had.  Divorce never crossed my mind.  Until, one day, it did.

I felt our marriage was beyond fixing, something truly against my Catholic upbrining and beliefs, against my faith!, deal breakers came in the form of many lies and much mud slung.  I could rationalize the intense feelings of mistrust that cropped up.  I could, for a while at least, rationalize the lashing out at the ones we’re closest to in form of name calling and accusations, no matter how off the wall they seemed to be at the moment.  I rationalized living in a parallel universe, but I was certain it would come to pass.

It became difficult to accept reason for no apologies however.  How does one say something terrible, knowing it’s terrible, to someone they love, and then NOT apologize?!  Even, eventually?  Not just no apologies for harm and pain intentionally caused, but the entire attitude of, ‘this is how we are going to be from now on....deal, because I’m a soldier.’

Um.  Hell no.  I all of a sudden had bootstraps pulling me almost against my will, along a path I never imagined.  By the time I found out computers were hacked and people planted in my life to ‘watch’ me, to report on me, or when I found the military-esque files filled out in detail with copies of letters I’d written, phone calls I’d had, places I went tracked, and discovered my cell phone was bugged to duplicate everything it did, well, what can I say? 

I felt I knew exactly who the enemy was.

For a while after my divorce I felt, at best, jaded.  It makes me nervous to admit that.  Since 9/11, the heroic, and well deserved spin that has been placed upon the shoulders of soldiers across the country has become the most acceptable lemming reaction.  Having the slightest doubt in my heart about that, scares me to admit.  Can you imagine the backlash?  No one admits they’d want to roll their eyes when they heard the National Anthem.  I didn’t feel quilty when I took the flag down from the side of my house, as I was moving out.  I went from being a known military supporter in my community, writing letters, sending care packages and participating in local parades, to being a woman who felt so scorned by what the military did to my husband, my life, my children, to me.  I just stayed quiet, off to the sidelines because I didn’t have a whole lot of anything nice to say anymore. 

If I had been proud of his service, I now found myself questioning why, as a spouse, my service to this country wasn’t recognized as a casuality itself.  This threw me into unfamiliar territory.  I’m not one with a “me,me,me” attiitude.  My mentality drifted into historical figures of women-folk waiting on the homefront, not valued, not recognized, and God dang!  That irked the shit out of me.  A family member here or there not appreciating me was one thing, and I wasn’t out brow beating people looking for appreciation.  But I’d be damned if I was going to be made to feel scorned as an a unsupportive wife of my military man.

This took me a few good years to come to terms with.  There wasn’t really a lightbulb moment that I can recall where it all clicked back to the warm and fuzzy feelings.  9/11 has been a hard day for me, for different reasons than most, I’d say.  Far, far away from tall buildings, or hijacked planes, I still felt because of it, I’d lost my husband.  I stopped attending local memorial services, but rather watched the national ones from my television, if at all.  I’d see the duplicated Facebook pictures and videos over and over posted from friends.  I’d hear my priest pray for the safety and protection of soldiers.  And I guess, secretly through it all, I’d grieve even longer over loss, so many degrees of loss.

This year was the first year in awhile I’ve been comfortable enough to feel the depth of gratitude in my heart for what service members provide for me.  The pendulum swings, and I’ve learned to rationalize, again.  I thought I was rationalizing that the actions of one couple in history, even when it’s me, has nothing to do with the big picture. 

And then I realized, it’s just the opposite.  That makes my gratitude run deeper yet.

I again, am able to sing along with the Anthem, mentally salute and thank a vet, and more importantly, mean it.