My best friend asked me recently how I did this MilSpouse thing, I’ve had a few other people tell me they don’t know how I do it and I know that other MilSpouses get the same comments and questions, too. It’s a tough gig, I’ll tell you that. The responses are many and varied and each of us does it differently. Yet we all have the same basic tools that we use and build on.

If you spend anytime at all trying to understand it for yourself, you’ll see that most articles and bloggers, other writers and advice columnists start off by telling you to “keep busy“. And at the core of dealing with military life, keeping busy is the single most important tool you have.

Some of us have jobs that keep us extremely busy and occupied, some have kids that keep them busy (and tired!) – others have their causes and hobbies, and still others have artistic ventures. There’s so many different ways to keep busy that it’s hard to pin point any one way.

For me … I have tons of interests and hobbies. For the year while he was down-range in Afghanistan, I had my job, I had my reading, my cats, I picked some TV show addictions. I had projects that I started – and most of them never finished. And I had sleep, lovely sleep. I learned a lot in that year; I read almost incessantly. And when I wasn’t reading or working, I was watching mindless TV or sleeping. I kept busy alright.

Oh don’t get me wrong!

You have moments when you feel you really, absolutely cannot go on. Those moments when the shit hits the fan and a big piece hits you in the face. You realize cleaning up would be so much easier if your other half was here. It’s a moment or two (or hundred) when you break and you fall on your ass on the floor and sob and blubber because at that moment, you are as alone as you have ever felt. And every time that moment happens, it’s worse than the last one. You literally break in half and settle into a puddle on the bedroom/bathroom/living room/kitchen floor. Pick one or all – it happens enough times for each floor to get it’s own special time with your face buried in it.

If you want to live, though … and you do because you know at some point your DH will be home and finding you on the floor in a puddle of unwashed, tearful misery is not the kind of image you want him (or her) to see … if you want to live, you will realize that food must be eaten, baths must be taken, bills must be paid, and work must be done. So you eventually pull yourself up from the puddle and wipe your face.

Then when you do that, you realize how positively septic you smell, and how ravenous you are and suddenly, the shit that hit the fan and how difficult it is going to be clean it up, is of far less importance than having a bath and eating some food. And in the eating of the food or the taking of the bath, you realize that the soap is almost done, or the towels need to be washed, but you’re out of laundry detergent… or curses! … you’re out of ice cream!

In short, you get past those moments of utter and complete despair and since life goes on whether you want it to or not, there are reminders that bring you back to the present and keep you busy again until the next break.

It’s a cycle. A long-time friend of mine once said to me that he savoured the emotional lows because they allowed him to really appreciate the highs. He wasn’t wrong… when you can survive through the lows, while you scrape the bottom and eat ice cream … then the highs are so much brighter and enjoyable.

It is being able to survive those lows that gives me my strength. I’ve survived some lows in my life. Oh boy! Some lows I thought I would never dig myself out of. Some lows where not even the brightness of the high was visible from that far down. Some lows where I didn’t know if I was going to make it through the next 5 minutes much less another few months. But I survived and I am here to tell you that the one thing that kept me going through a year of separation from DH … was the thought that one day he would hold me in his arms again.

And when he finally did …. it was absolutely the best thing in the whole world!

And oh yea – now that he’s here, I take every single opportunity to hug him … over and over and over again … because since the war isn’t over yet, I don’t know when he’ll be gone again and I want to make sure to store up as many of those hugs as I can for the days when I won’t be able to just take one.

You ask me how I do this? I do it because the alternative is inconceivable … now that I have found him, there is no way I am letting go of him. And when the army takes him away from me, I just think forward to when I get him back. And when he’s here, I make sure to maximise as many of the moments we have together as I can so that I have tons of memories and reminders to keep me going when he’s gone… and something to look forward to when he comes back.

And that is how I do it… because I can’t not. Simple – no?

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It’s been a whirlwind 2 weeks.

Hubby came home on R&R on the 11th …

The Friday before, I spent most of the day with his aunt in Austin – apartment hunting for her and my very first visit to an IKEA store. On Saturday, I spent the day scouring the places in the house that hadn’t seen scouring for a while … places like window screens, etc. I was exhausted Saturday night, but managed to sleep well enough to be in good shape on Sunday when he landed.

He’s been WoW starved, so he spent a great deal of time these last 2 weeks in-game. We managed to get out a little – camping one night, eats here and there, a drive to BLORA (where the campsite was), a visit to Michigan to see his family (surprised the beejesus outta all of them too) … it was a jam-packed week. The house looks like a tornado passed through.

I’ve been lazy these 2 weeks – instead of picking up after ourselves I let things slide because I wanted to maximise the time I had with him … some people would cringe and label me a bad housewife, but frankly I don’t care because I got to spend so much time with him that this is what he had to say after leaving:

That’s gotta make anybody smile.

Now that the whole 2 weeks are done and gone … I realize I feel like I’ve been run over. I ache in odd places, I am exhausted, the house is WAAAAY too quiet, the kittehs are sad … and the whole place just seems bleak. Even the damn weather is reflecting the mood.

The good part is I have a couple new toys to keep me busy for a few days whilst I get past the worst of this:

And the iPhone4 which arrived here on the Monday after hubs did.

Already the impact of the Nikon is obvious:

This is the latest Mission24 assignment – Burn. It’s the roasting fork hubs used to burn his hotdogs when we camped a couple weeks ago. I know … corny and a bit lame, but I’ve been out of practice. Bear with me, nuh?

Work has been a joke today … I haven’t been able to focus as well as I’d like today. Maybe I need a nap. Maybe I just need to push through the essentials and leave the frills for tomorrow … maybe I just need to try harder …

/sigh

Whatever … this post is already too long.

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This week is quite easily one of the worst weeks yet, in this deployment – for dozens of reasons.

Today, though, I was brought face-to-face with a very obvious fact. My friends love and appreciate me. It even seems as if 2 in particular are tag-teaming because one takes up the slack that the other leaves when their own lives call on them and I am finding myself without too many moments of utter despair and loneliness.

Thanks guys – you know who you are.

As for why this week has been the worst, I can’t really explain. It started with the flowers arriving and kind of climaxed with the disposal of said flowers when they finally died over a week later. It’s like a dam broke and ….

I just miss him.

Really badly.

And it hurts more this week than it has in the last 7 weeks. Maybe I just wasn’t dealing with it before, or maybe this is something new … and it doesn’t matter – at least I am attempting to face it.

/sigh

Tough as hell … house feels empty and barren; I feel lost and purposeless and without focus; and the brain is in hibernation – because simple things have become complicated and complicated things just plain impossible. Simple things like making a grocery list. Complicated things like …. work things. I made a monster mistake yesterday – one I wouldn’t have made normally. One that has me mortified.

Right now, I just want to go to sleep and wake up when it’s all better… considering it all, that would work out to be sometime in April of next year.

/sigh

All in all … it would be a hundred times worse if it weren’t for you guys who are there for me – even when I don’t think I need it.

So, thank you … all of you.

I appreciate you.

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This just arrived on my doorstep.

I am speechless and crying.

Happy crying .. “miss him” crying.. OMG-I-feel-SO-LOVED crying …

I love you, hon. Thank you.

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If you asked me what the trigger was for walking down memory lane today, I don’t think I could tell you. I started with when I first started playing WoW, scrolling through old screenshots of me in-game in those early days. Those triggered some bad memories, because the people with whom I played with at first are no longer a part of my life. It wasn’t so much the fact they were now persona non grata, but more the how of that fact that was sad. The better memories came when I stumbled on old screenshots of myself and hubby in-game.

You see, it was in the World of Warcraft that I “met” my now husband. And quite soon after I began playing the game in the first place. We “met” during a random encounter in-game. He was rude to me and I was rude back at him. Throughout the encounter, however, I realized that I liked his style — he wasn’t your usual typical senseless, stupid kid. He seemed to actually be a mature adult. So after said encounter, we agreed to hang around together some more.

From then on, we were practically inseparable – in-game that is. And when a couple months later he told me that he was going to be gone for a long period of time, I thought to myself “now why in heck would he think he needs to tell me that?” It was a long time for me before I registered that this was a real person behind the cartoon game character. I just never cared to find out more about this person. To be perfectly honest, my own life was as full as I intended to ever make it. I had experienced a great deal of drama and trauma in my personal life up to this point, and I had just about had it with people in general. So the fact that he was an actual person with whom I interacted regularly was beyond me … much less someone whom I would end up caring for and loving.

It wasn’t until much MUCH later that he said something to me that caused the ka-ching to happen in my head… something that indicated to me that while all I was doing was a mechanical kind of interaction, something was going on for him on his side … that he had made some kind of step forward whilst I sat back, stuck in that initial phase. It occurred to me that a fun dalliance with an nameless, faceless person might just be the thing I needed to get my head out of the doldrums – to enjoy life again. Even then, it never once occurred to me that it was going to be real, or that it would get much further than a few fun encounters.

Events followed that led to this day in a convoluted series of events that when I think of them now, I wonder how in HELL we got so lucky. The variables were stacked staggeringly against us almost every step of the way – from the cost of frequent visits to his profession and it’s restrictions among other things. Even our own stubbornness and resistances seemed to work against us.

Frankly, I look back and realize just how remarkable that we came to be together anyway. There was so much that we had to deal with to get here… not the least of which was age, cultural and professional differences. Yet somehow, we managed to get here. And here is somewhere so blissful.. so bright .. so shiny..

Every single day, every conversation I have with the other wives, I realize just how different we are, how lucky we are, how blessed we are, how open and how functional we are … how happy and how healthy we are. And happy isn’t even the right word … because we have our moments when happy is just not it. We get angry, we are sad, we are frustrated and worried and scared.. and we are all those things together. I’d say that beyond happy, we are content, satisfied.

I would have to say that is probably one of the greatest feats of all time – being content.

And the single most remarkable fact in all of this is that …. it all started in a game. And yes, even after all this time, it still makes me go “hmmm”

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