I would like to eliminate Sundays during deployment, please. Oh, I will still keep holy the Lord's Day. I just want to take the hours of Sunday and tack them on to other days of the week when I need those hours more.
Because a Sunday during deployment is not like other Sundays of the year. A Sunday during deployment is a day of not enough togetherness and too much time alone.
In an interview in this month's Good Housekeeping, actress Kyra Sedgwick talks about how she gets the blues so bad on Sunday that she had to make a rule (which is one of our military wife quotes): "Never Contemplate Your Life On Sunday."
That's good advice for military spouses during deployment, too. On a Sunday it is too easy to see other couples and other families who are not deployed. It is too easy to note other boyfriends sharing a burrito bowl with their girls at Chipotle. It is too easy to see other couples pass the baby back and forth at church. It is all too common to note other partners mowing the lawn together or watching the kids play hockey or standing in line at the Walmart.
Contemplating your military life on a Sunday means that you invariably come up short. On Saturday you can look cheerfully into the weekend with all your happy plans intact. On Sunday, the longing for a deployed service member is just too much. And the whole WHY ARE WE DOING THIS thing bears down on you like a Cat 5 Hurricane.
We get that here at SpouseBuzz. So if you are reading this quote on a Sunday, resolve not to weigh up your life at this moment. Instead, go for a complete distraction. Do something that occupies your whole brain--not TV or a novel, but something that you have to pay attention to.
Learn to cook something new and deliver it to a friend. Discover the antique row in your town and go on an I Spy mission to see count how many things your grandmother owned that are on sale now. Clean out your garage. Detail your car. Send a love note or a care package to your darling. Write something for us at SpouseBuzz.
Use those Sunday hours during deployment as if they were a gift from later in the week. You'll have other Sundays after deployment made for watching football and taking naps and talking for hours with your darling. Think about that tomorrow.
