A Year After Deployment

One year ago today, I welcomed my husband home from deployment.

I suppose, at some point in the near future, I should stop telling people that he “just got back from Iraq.” But I can’t. Because to me, it really does still feel like he just got back, and I’ve been waiting for that to change for almost a whole year now.

Those of you who have been through a deployment know, and those of you who haven’t have heard, I’m sure, that sending a loved one overseas is a grieving process.

That isn’t a dramatization. You will grieve. Daily.

Shock, denial, anger, bargaining, guilt, depression, acceptance—you’ll go through it. Sometimes, in the amount of time it takes to take a hot bath.

If deployment is a grieving process, then the days, weeks, and months that follow a service member’s homecoming are a recovery process. My question is this: how the heck long is this recovery phase going to last?!

When will I finally feel at peace and know that my husband is safe without having to see it with my own eyes?

When will I stop waking up in the middle of the night in a panic, reaching out to make sure that he’s really right there next to me, that he isn’t still in the middle of a war zone?

When will I stop getting a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach at the mere mention of the word “deployment?”

When will I stop turning into a blubbering idiot every time I see a military reunion, be it a real one on the news or an overly dramatized one in a movie?

My guess is never.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a basket case all the time. Now that my husband is home with us on a full time basis, my military spouse anxiety has lessened.

But it’s still there, and I feel like it always will be.

When my husband was in Iraq, I hated it when spouses who had been through deployments would tell me, “you’ll get through it.” I understand now, being on the other side of things, that those words are said with the best of intentions. When I talk to a friend whose spouse is deployed or facing an upcoming deployment, I smile and say the exact same thing.

Inside, though, my heart hurts for them. I feel a lump start to form in my throat and a panic attack begin to bubble up under my skin at the very thought.

It isn’t because I’ve forgotten, for one second, how awful deployments are. I try to be encouraging because I remember all too well what it feels like to live through that hell, and I know that the worst thing I can do is say, “Buck up, it’ll be fine! Enjoy your alone time!” Or be overly dramatic and say, “Oh my, it’s going to be one of the worst things you’ll ever go through. I seriously had a nervous breakdown during my husband’s deployment.”

I know now that when someone who’s been there tells you, “you’ll get through it,” it’s because they know, from experience, that sometimes it’s all you can do. 

I have this defense mechanism where I tend to block out unpleasant experiences as much as possible. I know they happened, I remember the important parts, but the rest I do my best to forget. As much as my husband’s deployment still haunts me, I find myself doing exactly that. The raw emotion that I captured in my journal, a lot of it in the smallest details, takes me by surprise sometimes, when I pick it up to review it.

It’s in the smaller moments that we live most of our lives. 

I will never forget the day my husband deployed, or the two weeks he came home for R&R in the middle of his deployment, or the homecoming ceremony that took place a year ago today.

But the time I collapsed in tears on the basement stairs because I found a pair of his boxers in the laundry?

The way I used to sit for hours, just staring at my computer screen, waiting for that little green dot to appear next to his name in the Facebook chat window?

Those are the kinds of memories that would be lost to me forever if I hadn’t written them down as they were happening.

Those are the things I read about now as if I’m reading someone else’s story. I find myself thinking, “Wow, was it really that bad? Was I really that much of a mess?”

And I know that it was, and that I was. 

It’s because I immortalized those darkest of days that I can say to others now, with complete confidence, you can do this. You will get through it.

I know, because I did. 

Those may not be welcome words now, if you’re in the midst of a deployment or gearing up for one, but please consider them anyway. Someday, you’ll be looking back, a year or so after your service member’s deployment, thinking “Holy crap, we made it!” And maybe, just maybe, that knowledge will be the strength that you need to get through your next deployment and the one after that.

Or, even better, maybe seeing you come out on the other side of your deployment struggle with your head held high, unashamed to say, “It sucked and I totally fell off the rails for a while, but I made it through” is exactly what someone else needs to make it through their deployment experience.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my milspouse life, it’s that we not only have more strength within ourselves than we realize, but also the strength to encourage and empower others like us.

No two military journeys are exactly alike, but sometimes, just the knowledge that there’s someone else out there who “gets you” and has been through something similar to what you’re going through is enough.

Sometimes it’s everything.