I took a trip three weeks ago to visit my husband's parents. Even though he's deployed, I wanted them to share in the pregnancy excitement and get to feel like grandparents-to-be for a few days. We had a nice visit, and on the way home I started thinking of the letter I could write to my husband about everything we did that week.
And then I got busy, and then I didn't feel so well, and then...the urgency passed. And I never wrote the letter.
This, to me, is the saddest part of deployment.
While we are separated, so many things happen to each of us. So many things that, if we were sitting down to dinner together in the same house, we would talk about animatedly. Little things, big things, all kinds of things. I am a chip casher; I like to relive every moment of my day with my husband.
When he's gone, I usually try to do this in a letter. But sometimes the moment slips by me, and every day that passes after the event is another day where it doesn't quite seem as important to document the event. And finally I hit a point where I just shrug my shoulders and say that nothing really earthshattering happened at his parents' house anyway, so there's no real point in writing a long letter about taking his grandma to see an assisted living facility.
And so he never gets told those things. And it's another nine months of our life that goes uncashed and unshared.
I am perfectly capable of living my life alone. I do just fine. I don't think about his absence very often and I don't dwell on all the time we've spent apart.
But sometimes, like when I get too lazy to write him a letter, I realize that there are 29 months of our married life that he's spent away from me. I think of all the moments we've both experienced that we were too tired to write about but that weren't monumental enough to remember to share once he gets home. All the little moments that weren't quite worth finding the time or energy to write in a letter.
And all those moments are gone.
I find that the saddest part of deployment.
