Hitting the (mental) wall

TEN MONTHS!!!!  So close, but not close enough.

It reminds me of the first marathon I ran (4 kids ago) in Richmond.  I just passed the 22 mile mark and was rather enjoying my first marathon. I had trained well and was feeling fine. There were lots of interesting people to chat with, but one guy I had to leave behind.  He said, "I feel like we're never going to get there."  That is POISONOUS thinking.  I picked up my pace and found a new person to talk to.

I am teetering on the brink of those same type of poisonous thoughts. You know them. You probably have thought some of them. Well, I am going to say them out loud. Verboten, I know. But sometimes seeing those thoughts in black and white robs them of their power.

"What was the point of getting married (or having kids) if he's never going to be here?"

"Good thing we're moving because I have taken over his closet space and his side of the bed."(This statement drips with sarcasm.  You want neither his side of the bed, nor his closet space. You want HIM at home, dammit.)

"How are we supposed to reintegrate when he'll probably leave again in 12 months?"

"Of course HE thinks (insert kid's newest trouble making adventure) is funny, he's over THERE. I'd think it was funny from Afghanistan, too."

"Next time, I'LL deploy. HE can stay here with these crazy people."


For those of you without a running problem, "hitting the wall" is the feeling associated with a physiological condition. Be it your pace or food choices, you have depleted the glycogen stores in your muscles. And you feel like crap.  Happened to me once on a training run and I will NEVER let it happen again.  All you can do is dig deep mentally and use your willpower to drag yourself across that finish line. 

I have hit the wall of this deployment. Stick a fork in me, I'm done.

I'm tired of being tired, and I think I lost my sense of humor in the car, or maybe at a doctor's office. 

I am also fighting the temptation of thinking that my husband's return will be some kind of silver bullet. Like the happiness fairy will sprinkle us with happy dust, and all will be sunshine and roses. We have a long summer of reintegration ahead of us.  Last year, I committed a normal Army wife sin- starting to distance oneself emotionally from a soon-to-be-deployed spouse a few months before he (or she) goes. We will have to rebuild those bonds, with 6 kids running amuck in the background.

So there it is. 

I'm at 22 miles, 4.2 to go, and feeling like I am never going to see the finish line.

Trying to take it one day at a time (me and the alcoholics). Trying to find just one thing to smile about each day.  Digging deep to drag myself across that finish line and into my husband's arms.

Rule of Army life #12: Never use pen on a calendar

After several weeks of chasing my tail (almost caught it once), I realized that I have neglected my writing. So easy to put aside those things that we do for ourselves. Whether it is writing or exercising, it is too often the first thing cut. I need to stop doing that.  It is the mental equivalent of balancing your budget by cutting the essentials first.

I shouldn't be surprised things have been busy. It is spring (at least, my calendar swears it is) and everyone comes out of their winter sleep to pack my calendar with activities.  Add on to that my husband's return (only 60ish days left!) and moving and the end of school.....yeah.  I'm going to need a vacation for sure.

I made the foolish error of putting some items on my calendar in pen. Big stuff- like last day of school. Some things are in pencil, either because they were tentative or I couldn't find a pen. I will confess to one item written in crayon, but I have since found all of my pens, so that shouldn't happen again.  But from now on, I will ONLY write in pencil.  I learned to do that in my address book years ago (only the names are in ink).

One expects a deployment date and travel dates to bounce around (like a high bounce ball :) ), but other things one expects to stay firm. And that is where I went wrong.

Today, I got a call from my kids' school about recess monitor volunteers.  I hate doing it in the cold, but it is a great way to see what my kids are up too.  The secretary said something about there only being five weeks left in the year (I am only counting down to my husband's return, could care less about school). It went right past me. Then I said Fridays were good, but I couldn't do May 27.  She said it wasn't a problem because there was no school that day.  I (still clueless) asked if it was a four day weekend and she replied, "No, the last day of school is the 25th." I started to feel the early symptoms of shock. "I thought school ended 3 June?" I asked hopefully.  (Like making her say it again would change the answer) "No," she said in her cheerful I'm-not-moving-so-I-think-it's-great voice. "It was changed." 

Note the passive voice. Way to cover some one's rear.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????

My kids just got an extra week of vacation and I lost a week of unpacking without their "help". It is a kid's dream and has wreaked complete havoc on my schedule. 

Can I move everything back 10 calendar days? Can I possibly do half the stuff I was going to do now that I lost 6 school days to vacation? Does anyone owe me a favor/ feel sorry for me and will help me unpack and watch kids? If so, is their calendar full?  Would anyone else like to reschedule anything else before I misplace the white-out again?

The moral of this story is NEVER use pen on your calendar, because it isn't just the Army that will jerk you around. 

Not a rocket scientist, but still doing fine

Today, I begin the process of rediscovering my inner math-lete. 

I have rescheduled my teacher's exams, so I will soon be neck deep in polynomials and the like.  Rescheduled, you ask? Yes. I HAD scheduled them for November and March, but the Army said we weren't staying in VA, so I cancelled them.  But the Army has since changed its' mind and said we ARE staying in VA, so the tests are back on.  Mercifully, it only cost me time, not money.

Back to my inner math-lete.

I tend to think of myself as not particularly good at math.  This perception comes from my 4 years spent at what my grandfather jokingly referred to as "Bill Clinton's Finishing School for Young Ladies on the Hudson."  I made it through all the wretched math classes there, but they were challenging. And boring, did I mention boring?  It left me with the impression that, when it came to math, I was just shy of a moron.

Well, #1 commented the other night (when tripped up by the distributive property) that he was glad he had a mom who was so good at math. Hmm.  Thinking back to high school, I aced every honors math class I took.  Hmm.  Maybe I am good at math, just not ready to be a rocket scientist like some of the super-smart people I went to school with. (Seriously, one guy I know did go work for NASA)  And to be fair, it IS an engineering school.  Us touchy-feely literature-history types just had to deal with it. Maybe math isn't the problem, maybe I have a perception issue.

This train of thought reminded me of when I graduated and went out to the "real" Army, and all us type As were split up, instead of feeding off of each other.  I thought I was on the short side (I'm 5'7") and a slow runner (I used to run 2 miles in 14 minutes because I wouldn't get any more points for going any faster).   Turns out I am not short, and I was faster than a fair number of the male soldiers, to include a commander that I wasn't a big fan of. Now THAT was a satisfying 2 mile run ;). 

It makes me realize that perceived success all depends on who one chooses to use as a benchmark. So as the kiddos get older, I really have to be on the watch for comparisons between siblings or anyone else. 

I also realized that I don't have to ace this teacher exam, so I can relax a little bit.  And the pass grade is lower than the pass grade in some of the other subjects. (That concerns me, actually. Why would it be okay for the math teachers to score lower?)  This is EASY math, not the imaginary curves in space foisted upon my by my humorless Calc 2 professor. 

Time to be a little less hard on myself.

Where's my ribbon?

I had an absolutely lovely four-hour lunch (you read that right) with a dear friend this week.  We set the goal of lunching monthly (which cuts our lunches down to only two hours), but it just didn't happen last month. So this month, we had even more to say. 

Her husband is retired. I am looking forward to disposing of all that Army stuff we have accumulated over the last too-many years. It's nice to have someone ahead of you on the road you are travelling. We discussed our husbands' jobs and kids and so forth. We discussed our own (lack of) careers and the roadblocks placed in the path to most careers just because you are Mrs. Soldier.

My friend is an amazing woman. She is a military brat AND a military wife.  She moved every 24-36 months until she was 40. WOW. Talk about a tough transition when her husband hung up the uniform.  She truly NEVER knew another way to live. I can look back on my childhood, and while we moved around NYC a little bit and had a few school changes, it was nothing like the experiences of a military kid.  She's my hero. She joked about waiting for a plaque recognizing the 40 years she gave the military.

But she's right. She served. Just like I serve.

I serve by waiting. I serve by living in a place without becoming part of it, because I already have my eye on the next move.  I serve by fighting with the transportation office, armed only with my POA and a NY accent that erupts when I'm ticked off, to set up a move so he doesn't have to.  I serve by mailing him an endless stream of boxes, so much so that the post office people know me. I serve by trying to be both parents, even though I know it is a futile effort.

I serve by sending MY husband, while most of America stays home. 

And my kids.... Hell, at least I chose this. This is their inheritance. Duty, Honor, Country, and a helping of Selfless Service on the side.

So, tonight, I lift my late-night glass of fabulous Italian wine to my compatriots-  my fellow spouses and our kids.  We get no retirements, no ribbons, no titles. We sacrifice our education, jobs, friends, homes and sanity.

Cheers to you. You are pillars of the nation, keeping it strong. Like the supports on a bridge, taken for granted that we will hold and always be there.  But I know your sacrifice. Maybe one day, all of America will. 

Insomnia- it adds more hours to my day

There are more PhDs than things to study.  That's just my theory.  But somewhere, there is a PhD studying deployments and how it affects soldiers, families, communities, and so on. (Actually, I know one of them.) All this studying to tell us what any military wife with 2+ deployments could already tell you.  And I bet she'll work cheaper than the PhD.  I am being a bit facetious, as I recognize that "they" are looking for patterns across a fairly sizeable military.  But reading the reports, I always wonder how much it cost to confirm what we all know.

At least this research, theoretically, will improve things for military families.  My favorite PhD story of all is from a conference my husband attended where someone gave a briefing on their long, in-depth study of the declining size of alligator penises in FL.  Seriously.  Even funnier than the topic were the two General Officers who were joking about the topic in the row in front of my husband- mostly about how one might go about trying to measure said alligator parts, and how it was no surprise that the gators ran from the researchers, they were embarrassed by their diminutive organs.  

But back to my original thought

Someone named stages of deployment, including anger, denial, grief and acceptance.  But they left out insomnia.

I am sure it is stress-related, not that knowing the cause helps a whole lot.  It also just makes the deployment longer because I get to consciously experience even more hours of everyday.  Which makes me cranky, and then makes the kids cranky, and then raises my stress level, leading to (that's right!) insomnia. 

So I will break out the home remedies- chamomile tea, soft lights, dull movies, benedryl. Let's just hope I can end the streak before it really gets going.