Dividing Time

We have a guest post today from a military mama who has had a lot going on! We are so happy to feature moms and families on our blog and are thrilled to be able to welcome Marie Norman as a guest blogger. Not only does she have the everyday challenges that we all have as moms, but she has added stress because she is holding down the fort while her husband is off fighting for our freedom. You can also check out Marie on Simple Family Wellness!

As children, we quickly learn how to divide time: miles stones between that interminably long year between Christmases, sleepy-by’s and wake-ups until grandma comes, weeks of school until summer vacation, years until the coveted drivers’ license. The list could go on and on. What do you do as an adult to divide time? Days? Weeks? Hours? It depends on what you are waiting for.

What if you are waiting for a deployment to end? How do you divide up a year so you can wrap your head around your spouse being gone for what is, in essence, that interminably long year between togetherness? For our last deployment I didn’t even try to come up with a way to measure time. Honestly, it didn’t really go very well and I spent the whole year in a kind of quiet and brooding desperation. I had a different plan this time around.

I was going to divide this one up into trimesters of a pregnancy! That was the big plan. We were successful in conceiving and I was able to give my husband the good news when he arrived at his deployment destination. So now I had everything set: weeks and months would be divided up by doctor’s appointments and the baby’s milestones, the birth would be about three months before my husband returned home and time flies after a new baby is born! It was going to be a deployment of bittersweet expectation and hope!  My two older children, three and two years old, were telling me they had babies in their tummies and we were off to a rolling start!

I had already carried two children to term and delivered without complication: I have high risk pregnancies due to an auto-immune thyroid disorder, but nothing had ever even moderately gone wrong before. So why did I have this lack of desire to tell family we were pregnant? I started telling close friends, but still not family. Finally my husband asked, “Are we going to wait until the kid is born to tell family we are expecting?” He was joking, but by 8 weeks I was ready to tell more people.

The day after my birthday we told our grandmothers and our parents. Everyone was elated and I went in for my initial ultrasound that afternoon. The baby measured 6 weeks and 5 days. It was small. There was no heartbeat. The doctor didn’t really say much, just that it was early and my dates could be a bit off; I knew my dates were not off. We scheduled a repeat ultrasound for the next week and with a heart full of dread, I headed home.

The next week was agonizingly long. I didn’t even try to divide up the days, it was unmanageable. The kids were barely being fed, I was horribly nauseated and clinging to that as a sign everything was ok. I tried to prepare my husband without sounding alarmist or like a hypochondriac, but he was in a war: I didn’t want to add even more stress to his days and nights. I felt like I was walking a tightrope.

The morning of my repeat ultrasound I remember telling God, “I know You can do anything, so please, give us a good ultrasound and a healthy baby.” When the time came for the actual procedure, I couldn’t look at the screen, I was holding on to hope until the last second. Time stood still. The doctor was very quiet and I finally asked, “is there anything there?” She just said, very tenderly, “I’m sorry.” I miscarried at 10 weeks.

So now the deployment year had a new division: before the miscarriage and after the miscarriage. My emotions have run the gamut: numbness, sorrow, loneliness, acceptance then back to numbness, etc. The most difficult part is the separation between me and my husband. We now had a new separation to overcome: there was not only the physical distance, which is difficult enough, but now an emotional chasm was opening up between us. If we didn’t figure out how to fill it back up with love, we ran the risk of it swallowing up our relationship. I wasn’t mad at God, I was just very sad and afraid of what was happening between me and my husband. I asked Him for help and He sent me some wise women to lean on.

I was so hurt because I hadn’t yet heard the words from my husband that he was hurt, or sad or anything. You see, combat and war cause men and women to have to put certain feelings aside for a while. Acknowledging those feelings opens up a pathway for other emotions to overtake them and hinder their ability to function in the capacity required by war. It wasn’t that he, my husband, wasn’t sad or hurt, it was that he couldn’t allow himself to feel those feelings. Once I understood this it became more manageable for me to send him emails, pictures and packages; believe me, those things were starting to fall off as I became more and more hurt by his apparent (as perceived by me) silence.

So now there is another time division: before my understanding and after my understanding. Through two and a half deployments I would always have times of feeling hurt, ignored and neglected by my husband. That was before the understanding. After the understanding I know he is torn by his desire to protect and provide for our daily needs and his need to survive the environment he is in. I have decided to bear the burden of the emotions for now, there will be time for hugs and tears together when he comes home.

For now, my job as a military spouse is to bear the burden he would but can’t and give it all to God, who always knows best.