Can’t Wait to Come Home

“I can’t wait to come home.”

This was the text I received from my husband earlier today, about six months into our most recent deployment. 

The funny thing is, he won’t be coming home to a place he knows. I’m packing our kids and saying goodbye to my family, moving across the country, and unpacking all our things in a house he’s never seen, nor I for that matter, on an installation we haven’t lived at before.

His first steps home will be to an unknown little townhouse where he’ll have to ask me where our bedroom is and where to drop his bags. I, alone, will assign all the cupboards their appropriated kitchenware, and he’ll never find the ice cream scoop again.

He’ll have to learn all the kids’ new schedules and try to adapt to our new normal, as if adjusting back to the old normal wasn’t hard enough. 

I told him I couldn’t wait to have him home. Regardless of the fact that I don’t know what home looks like either.

A heartbreaking amount of goodbyes will be said and an overwhelming amount of new names and places will be learned before he’s in my arms again.

This deployment won’t last forever. His time away trickles slowly some days and seems to rush by on others.

“I guess you knew what you were getting into,” a friend shrugged tonight while I tried to explain our convoluted 10-page moving plan at a 4-year-old’s birthday party.

I did know. And so did he. He signed a contract and I signed a wedding license and seven years later here we are.

Both longing for home and yet having no tangible sense of what that home could be yet.

Home hasn’t been found in the five addresses where our mail has been sent, the five doors we’ve opened and closed, or the five driveways we’ve parked our cars.

We’ve brought so much into those varying homelike buildings. Four children, a lot of laughter, and our fair share of tears.

We’ve learned to love the different layouts and the familiarity of our worn furniture that follows us from place to place. But the moment we turn in the keys and say goodbye, these buildings are immediately scrubbed down and given to a new family with new memories and all signs that this was once our home are erased.

It’s not our home. It’s just a house.

When he says he can’t wait to come home, it’s not to any of the places we’ve left memories behind that comes to his mind. It’s me. It’s the little army of people we’ve created together. It’s the ones who love him so deeply that we keep our roots short and our branches long. We will go to the ends of the earth, start fresh over and over, again and again. Just to have him by our side for a little while.

There’s a corny cavalry saying that goes, “Home is where you hang your Stetson.” This is true. But home is also where he hangs his trust, his heart, and his hope that wherever he lands, I’ll still be waiting. 

When I say I can’t wait for him to come home, I’m not picturing the roof we’re under or the room we’ll be in.

I’m not picturing the community we’ve built or the people we surround ourselves with.

I wouldn’t keep dragging the kids all over creation and keep saying those hard goodbyes if that was all there was to picture.

Home, to me, is my heart having that final piece that he took when he said goodbye.

I’d go anywhere to have that piece back, whether it’s here or Kalamazoo. If he’s there, then so I’ll be.

Until then, I’ll unpack the boxes and make the appointments and hope to heaven I have the right POA. I’ll shuttle the kids around and continue in my feeble attempts at laundry in a new building that means nothing to me.

Until he walks through the door, and once again we have a home.