While we are in the middle of our PCS (permanent change of station) to Maine and Dustin is finishing his tour in Pensacola, Fla., our family is living apart. The boys and I are staying with my parents in Virginia, and Dustin is living in the BOQ (Bachelor Officers' Quarters) in Florida. None of this is really that important, at least not to you, except that our separation has given Dustin some interesting insights into what it's like to be alone when your spouse is deployed. These insights, for the most part, make me want to say to him, "nanana boo boo, I told you so."

Here are Dustin's observations, which will take two columns to cover (because, yes, he really is learning that much):

Cooking for one is not much fun. Every night, when Dustin and I talk on the phone, I ask him what he ate for dinner. This is because women who are mothers have a need to make sure that everyone, even people who are not their children, is fed.

Dustin usually answers with something like, "I had a bag of peanuts and chips with salsa," or, " I warmed up a frozen dinner in the microwave." So I feel really bad when he asks what we ate, and we've had something homemade. I suggest that he go out to dinner, but he says that seems like a lot of trouble and kind of weird to sit alone.

Then, one night, I asked Dustin what he had for dinner, and he said, "John and Margaret had me over to their house to eat."

And, you know, I couldn't remember anyone having me over to dinner when I was living alone. Hmmmph. But they probably thought that I — the woman who is a mother and likes everyone to be fed — was surely cooking for herself.

Weekends are the worst. When you are alone, weekends are the worst. Three-day, holiday weekends can drive a person who is living alone insane. Theoretically, this is because the workweek provides distraction from loneliness. When Dustin was deployed, however, I wasn't working outside the home. There was no perceivable difference between Mondays and Saturdays. Still, Saturdays were the worst. It didn't matter that I did the same things on Saturday that I did on Monday: I got up, fed the baby, walked the dog, ate pizza, called my other lonely friends, thought about cleaning the bathrooms, chose not to clean the bathrooms, went to bed and fell asleep with the television on. When the day was Saturday, or even Sunday, it was always lonely, always boring and mostly awful. This was because, on a weekend, I had the hope (however misguided) of something more, something fun.

People are supposed to look forward to weekends. Weekends are meant for family and togetherness. Monday through Friday, I loved my neighbor next door, but when I saw her taking a walk with her husband on Saturday, I wanted to throw dirty diapers out my window at her. If I saw her walking with her husband on a Monday that was a holiday, I felt even more jealous. On those days, I closed all the curtains and tried to believe that everyone around me was just as annoyed about the three-day weekend as I was. "They really want to be at work," I'd tell myself. "I know it."

Last Saturday, Dustin called me from his BOQ room and said, "Weekends are pretty lonely, huh?" I felt momentarily justified — like when Dustin gets the baby dressed and realizes that it really is difficult to make him stay still long enough to snap the 100 buttons on his shirt — until Dustin said, "So next weekend, I think I'll do a cross-country [the Navy's term for flying training missions to another state, usually one with sunny beaches, pro football teams, or lots of bars] to Pennsylvania to see a baseball game."

Huh?

When I was alone on weekends, I had children to tend to. The extent of my spontaneity was taking the boys to a restaurant without a clown or a "Kids Eat Free" sign hanging in the window. I didn't think it was fair that Dustin could just up and go to another state to escape the loneliness.

What I hadn't anticipated, however, was how a baseball game just wouldn't be the same for Dustin without the boys and me there. In-state or out-of-state, baseball game or no baseball game, weekends are still the hardest part.