Military wife just breathe

Well, today I cried like a fool, with my ass sunglasses on so the kids couldn’t see my tears, just let it all flow down my cheeks, puddling onto my neck and shirt. My daughter, “I’m going to bring this Carmel roll home for daddy” “Mommy please change the station this song makes me sad and think of daddy” “mommy grandpa doesn’t know how to make my owies feel better like daddy does” This was all being said in an hour.. what can I say, I broke the hell down in my car, driving 85 miles an hour driving down the interstate, just out of no where it all hit me like a damn semi at 85 miles an hour and I cried… for 2 hours.. all the way home. I don’t know what she thinks, I don’t know how the hell she is feeling but what I do know is that’s she’s going through something, probably the hardest thing she’s ever gone through in her life. She’s never had to face life without 2 parents constantly near her, I don’t know what’s going on in her mind or how she’s taking it, she’s 4 she doesn’t know how to express her feelings, all she knows is that daddy’s been gone, for too long this time, he’s still not home at night and she misses the hell out of him, she doesn’t want to talk to him on FaceTime anymore she just wants him to come home and sleep with her at night. How the hell do I comfort that? Sometimes, I know everyone goes through this one way or another, you lay in bed and wonder if your doing a good job at raising your kids. Do I yell at them too much? Do I make them sad, am I really doing a good job at playing the roll of mom and dad? God I don’t know sometimes, you just wonder ya know. I don’t know how to comfort my little girl, this time, for the first time, I can’t fix her broken heart, I can’t, I want too, I would do anything to make this girl not go without her daddy for a year, but there is nothing I can do, someday, maybe I’ll except that, but not today, or tomorrow that’s for sure. I will continue to buy her too many toys, and let her stay up late sometimes with me, and eat ice cream whenever the hell she wants, and buy candy at the store. Maybe that’s my way of trying to fill both parents? I don’t know… but I hope it helps get her through the day another day without her daddy.

I feel like I want to tell you everything, like I don’t know who else to tell when I get good news, or even bad news. It’s difficult for me to open up to people, always has been, that’s why I’ve been a writer all my life, when my life gets exciting or emotional or sad I write, it’s my therapy I guess, how I get it out, with our actually getting it out I guess. But some how I feel satisfied after writing about it, but it’s still not the same as talking to you, and telling you everything. When you go to the pre deployed meetings, they tell you over and over again, tell them what you have too, don’t try and worry them with things that are happening at home because they have enough to worry about where they are as is and don’t need to be worrying about things back home… YEAH.. so I totally get this trust me it makes sense. But on my side, this is hard because what’s important and what’s not important? And if I don’t tell him everything will he be upset with me in the future about something I didn’t tell him? I mean where do you draw the line. Do I tell you our son has been throwing up for 8 days? I don’t know cause there’s nothing I or can do about it, your not here, so why concern you with his illness. But WHAT IF it gets worse, or he ends up in the hospital, then he’s going to wonder why I didn’t tell him. I mean I’m stumped because I wanna tell you, everything, I guess I’m just used to telling you every little thing, good or bad, and just venting to you about it, every night, god I miss that. I guess I got 8 more months to try and figure out what’s important and what’s not…

It was one of those days, the ones that you got absolutely no sleep, because your 4 year old thought there was a monster in your room, and your lil one was sick and uncomfortable. You look at yourself in the mirror and wonder if you should try and cover up the big bags under your eyes that make you look like a vampire, or just leave them because your too tired to even begin to put on any makeup. days that start this way, you only know are going to continue to get worse, they just always do. Tonight though, I was going through the drive thru at 8 o’clock at night because I didn’t feel like making myself anything and I was hungry after taking my daughter to gymnastics and realized that I forgot to eat supper.. again.. I was pulling up to pay and the lady looked at me twice, I just figured oh god I know I’m a hot mess, but she handed me back my card and said, thank you for your service. I suddenly got goose bumps, honestly nobody has ever said that to me before, they say it to my husband all the time, but not once has someone said it to me. Believe it or not, who ever that person was, I can’t begin to thank them enough because even though it was something so small and simple that was said to me, it touched my heart. It makes you feel like all these hard days and bad nights are all of the sudden some what worth it, that there are people out there that actually do appreciate your sacrifice. It was a good feeling. I wish she only knew that it made my whole day. Speak up sometimes, you never know who’s day you can change.

Do you ever feeling like your life is so routine, that your just floating day to day, doing to the same things everyday, seeing the same people everyday, eating the same foods, running the errands, just boring. Nothing exciting is happening, your doing nothing exciting because your too scared or too tired or too emotionally drained to even want to try, yet you can’t help but feel insanely unsatisfied. This feeling is so annoying to me. I’m sick of the routine, I’ve been trying to step out of my bubble but for some reason still feel unsatisfied and just sick of day to day same old same old. I really want a change, I want to be happy, I want to be me again.

(Present)

Today I learned how far 8,650 miles truly felt. When your loved one gets hurt there’s not a damn thing you can do about it but sit and wait. I’ve never felt so far, and so alone in this than I did today. Not being able to do anything to help or to just hold your hand well your in pain, not being able to touch you just broke me. It’s a kinda pain not many understand because they’ve never been through it, I don’t blame them, I just don’t want to tell them because I don’t want pity or to be constantly annoyed by them asking and asking how everything is going, all I want is to be able to be there with you, to see you well and then off you can go. But I don’t have that option do I. I don’t have any option really. But to sit and wait.

Today was one of those days.. no one sees it no one hears it. Sometimes you feel better sometimes you don’t. Knowing that everyone and everything around you is still going but you are just sitting there in silence tears running down your face and you don’t even know what’s actually wrong… is it your messy house to go home and clean or wondering if your kids had a good day after you guys have a rough morning before school and work ? Wondering why you never feel you’re doing good enough being a single mom ? But today was one of those days just to sit in the Hy-Vee parking lot and let it all out. I know I’m not alone in this even though many just wont admit it, trust me I usually wouldn’t either, but I’m writing this in the thought process that nobody will ever read it, so there’s that.. lol ahh we just have to learn to take a step back, take a breath and just breath and take it moment by moment because life is hard sometimes and you feeling so alone in everything doesn’t help, ever!

Present…

I have this shirt of yours in my closet in the floor, sitting in top of my scrap book stuff, I never washed it when you where home a couple months ago..it’s weird but it was hard for me to do the laundry at all honestly, putting away your clothes for the last time for a whole year, made me sick to my stomach, idk just didn’t settle or feel right. This shirt I found on the floor, of course, by the gun save kinda tucked in, I picked it up of course after I put all the clothes in the wash, I sat on the bed and I caught a familiar smell, it was the shirt it was your smell. I sat there and smelled it for a few minutes and kept it in my closet ever sense. Every once in awhile when I’m missing you I smell your shirt, I hope your smell never fades because it’s the only thing that I have that smells just like you right now, and I’ll take it. Better than nothing right?

I honestly don’t even know where to start, do I go all the way back to the beginning, or do I start say 10 year ago? This is hard, but it’s also hard for anyone to understand slightly where I’m coming from if they don’t know the whole story, but I feel like that will take years to tell. We’ve been through a lot me and him, we’ve been through so much it’s honestly hard to think anything else could possibly happen, but then it does. Life throws us the craziest challenges at probably the worst and most inconvenient times it possibly could, but what do we do? Kick that shit right in the ass. I love my husband, I always have, since I was 16 years old, that’s almost 13 years, I mean I must love him to put up with him for that long right? Haha no I’m just kidding we’ve had our breaks, and our break ups in between but some how came back to each other and fell in love all over again. Crazy how life works isn’t it? Nobody’s perfect, we’ve both made some pretty terrible mistakes, I mean the first time we where together we got engaged at 18 I mean we where YOUNG, I think the only reason he purposed was because 2 weeks after he got home from basic training and AIT he got orders that he was getting deployed to Afghanistan, and he was scared shitless, scared of missing out, scared of loosing everyone, just scared. I didn’t realize it back in the day when we where young, but I sure as hell do now. I think he was going through something emotionally and was so scared to talk to anyone about it that he started to do things to try and pull people closer to him for comfort, I’m not really sure, to this day, we still haven’t really talked about it. It was a hard thing to go through so young, these are suppose to be the happiest days of your life, going to collage, staying up all night drinking, partying, doing stupid shit you won’t remember the next day. This is what I wanted to be doing, what everyone else was doing. Not sitting in my basement crying because the love of my life is being put in harms way and I don’t even know if he’s alive or what he is doing or where he is at. This was really hard and painful for me. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and all I could worry about was what he was doing and if he was okay. I knew that something had to change I just couldn’t see what it was tell it happened. We separated on this deployment, I know what your all thinking, typical. Right? Well this at the time is what was best for the both of us, we where too young to be going through these things together, we needed to find ourself and figure out what we wanted to do with our lives, separately, and if we found each other again then so be it. His deployment ended up getting extended, he was gone for almost 18 months. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think about it, worry about him, not knowing how he was doing or what he was doing. I never did try to keep in touch, if was just too painful and to hard. I recently asked him, how he felt when he got home from being gone for so long. He told me he felt alone, like all his friends where gone and that he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with his life. This was very interesting to me because it’s like even though he was gone everyone kept living, everything keeps going round, and you leave and you go and see the way other people live and the way other countries are but then you have to come home and feel alone? That just doesn’t seem right to me but I completely understand 110% what he means. It’s just shocking that this is what our soldiers that risk their lives everyday feel when they finally get to come home, something that they’ve probably been so excited for and looking forward too for months, and then they get to come home and feel alone? I hope my husband never feels that way again, but then thinking about it, that’s exactly how I feel now..