Let’s say that you play the waiting game according to the rules: Email your service member every day. Keep busy with work and family. Stay optimistic! Then let’s say that the waiting game goes on and on for freakin’ EVER. What then? This week SpouseBuzz reader Betty McGee asks what you do when you are tired of living in limbo:
My husband has been gone 20 of 24 months. He has been back off and on for 2 weeks and wants to fix things around the house, visit with the kids and go on a small vacation in that short time. Then he leaves again. We email every day and he calls everyday too! I don't know if we will ever be a couple again. He has gotten used to being alone and now is planning to get a job out of town too. I don't know how our marriage can survive this. He seems very optimistic and keeps telling me to hang in there, but it's getting old. I am tired of playing the waiting game and hanging out with my daughter and my grandson. I take mini trips to visit friends and go to dinner quite often, but I still get lonely. He has told me numerous times that this is the very last deployment and then volunteers again because he can't find a job. I have tried to be supportive but I don't want to continue living like this. In limbo.
My challenge for you SpouseBuzz readers is to give Betty a solid answer—how DO you play the waiting fame? Because military spouses live in limbo all the time. It is a part of our lives to wait. Wait for someone to get home from deployment. Wait for PCS orders to come through. Wait for a promotion board. Wait for a school acceptance. We wait and wait. It's a skillset, dammit. So how do you explain what that waiting skillset looks like? Aside from our mottos Semper Gumby
! and Keep Busy! how exactly do YOU cope
with the constant waiting game?
Navy wife Jacey Eckhart is Editor of SpouseBuzz and author of I Married a Spartan?? The Care and Feeding of Your Military Marriage available on iTunes, Amazon, and on www.jaceyeckhart.com.
