Wow! That is quite a post before this one. I am completely in awe of Jackie and her story and how much she has to share with us, to the point that it feels selfish and shallow to write about the more mundane issues of my life.
This was brought clearly to me yesterday as I was having a little pity party. It has been a rough few weeks, and I'm totally hormonal, and my kids are basically home from school for the next two weeks. Despite the fact that I know that every deployment is a snowflake, and that I don't truly have any huge issues to deal with, and that comparisons are not useful, I realized that I think that my husband has been on his current deployment longer than any of my friends' husbands have been on their current deployment.
I swear I am not usually like this, but I got fixated. I couldn't quite exactly remember when particularly people had come and gone, and I was running down the
author list on the right hand side of SpouseBUZZ. Airforce wife? Yeah, I think my husband has been gone longer. Andi? Aw, heck, Mr. Andi's sort of home...and so on. And then I got to Jackie. You can probably imagine how that whole thought process went through my head. And I knew that I wanted to write about it. Then I thought that I couldn't. Except that maybe I should. Then I thought that I could write about how I couldn't write about it.
I don't even know what the point would be. That making comparisons is
human nature even when we know that they are useless? That I'm damn
lucky that my husband is coming home? How I
felt when I realized how selfish I was being? That I felt I couldn't
write about?
So there it is, and hiding isn't going to make it better. I have my struggles, you have your struggles, and the widow or widower you know has his or her own struggles. We're all just people trying to get by the best we can. Tiptoeing around the elephant isn't really helpful to anyone, so I'm kicking him out. I think it will open up at lot more room around here.
