A couple of days ago my husband and I were talking about something that I was planning to do next year. He made the comment, “I might be deployed then…” It kinda took me by surprise a little bit. My husband has been home for 9 months now and we finally get to have more than a year between deployments. This means that although he has already been home for almost a year, we are not in pre-deployment mode. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a deployment in our future. There is and I have a feeling it will be upon us before we know it.
This scares me! I have been through three deployments but the thought of starting a fourth one scares me. I worry that I won’t be able to handle it like I have in the past. Kids are older and I have more of them. My tiny baby won’t be a baby anymore. He will be in the middle of his toddler years, about the time you really need two parents around. I have two older chidren with special needs. One we didn’t know about last deployment. I worry about that. That it will be too much for me to handle all by myself. But really, what choice do I have? Having a husband in the Military means you single parent sometimes. You don’t have a choice.
I am hoping that when the time comes I will be ready to do it alone again. That I will have the patience and the strength to get-through the time apart. And while I know that deployment is going to happen eventually I am going to try not to dwell on it and try to fully enjoy having my husband home with us. I am going to fully enjoy the weekends together, the date nights, the trips out with the boys. I am going to appreciate all of it because sometime in the future we will be saying goodbye again, the countdown will begin and we will have yet another deployment to get though.
