No Way to Make Some Things Pleasant

I'm going to start off by saying I'm fine.  I'M FINE.  This is not a plea for sympathy.  In fact, sort of the opposite, as odd as that seems, because I'm finding this easier to write about than talk about with anyone.  I don't want to talk about it, but I still have thoughts I need to sort through, and that's really what this blog is for.

This week I went for a followup mammogram.  The one I got just after my birthday was with a new "3-D" machine and it apparently sees more than the old machines, so the new pictures essentially became the new baseline, and they needed to look at some things more closely.  Most of those things turned out to be cysts that they are not worried about.  One small nodule requires a biopsy to be sure it's benign.

Holding Fear at Bay

A friend of ours in town is getting deployed again.  He's headed to Afghanistan before the month is up.  This news has hit me harder than I would have expected.

People I don't know well, but who are aware Ian's been deployed at some point, sometimes ask if he's home, not realizing that he's been back since 2010.  I don't get unsolicited political commentary about our engagements overseas as often anymore.  Nowadays when people feel the need to remark on Ian's status in the Reserves they say something along the lines of, "Well, isn't it great he won't get called up anymore?"  As if all is fine in the world.  As if we no longer have troops stationed anywhere.

But he can still get called up.  There is no way to predict the odds on that today.  The first time we literally had six days notice and the thought of reliving that terrifies me.  I try not to let the idea of Ian being gone again invade my thoughts, but I can't control my dreams.  I'm not sleeping well lately.

Fears (Babble)

I’m having trouble sleeping, even though Quinn is lying here next to me in bed.  Normally his soft breathing and his little arm across me as he sleeps makes the nights without Ian here better, but not tonight.  For some reason I’m having more trouble than usual quieting my fears enough to shut my eyes.  Rather than ignore them tonight I feel like laying them out like change on a table, and sorting through them for a little while.  Maybe listing them will make them look ordinary and dull and then I’ll sleep.

The obvious fear that everyone can understand is that I worry my husband will be killed in Iraq.

But since I live with that fear over an extended period, it grows and fractures and that particular fear gets broken down into parts.  I fear the initial shock of the idea of soldiers coming to my door to tell me.  If I let my mind linger there too long I wonder if I would be polite and let them in, or in such denial and distress that I bar the door and hide inside.  I don’t want to think about the funeral I’d have to be responsible for.  I recoil at the thought of what it would do to my kids.

But there are other fears about what could happen to Ian that scare me about as much.  I worry about him becoming a different person because of this experience–a person who scares me or that I couldn’t live with anymore,  I fear what would happen to him if he were responsible for the death of someone else, or if someone under his command were hurt or killed because of decisions he made or failed to make.   What if the person who comes back to me from the war is someone who hates himself now?  At what point do the unspoken vows to my children override the vows we made to each other at our wedding if his mental state makes him unsafe to our family?


I fear injuries that change everything.  Brain damage that robs me of the man I loved but will continue to care for for the rest of my life.  I fear missing limbs and destroyed skin and blindness.  I fear PTSD.

I fear that decisions that I had to make on my own while he’s been gone will have been wrong.  That he’ll be disappointed in me somehow, or that I’ve neglected important things that make his life harder when he comes home and he resents me for it.  I fear that adjusting to this life after the war will be dull.  I fear that after having so much responsibility and respect, that the drudgery of caring for small children will be frustrating and leave Ian feeling undervalued.

Okay, it feels good to lay those out.  Fears always look larger when trapped inside my head, and now I can be more rational.  Ian came back from the last deployment still the guy I knew.  He still sounded like my same Ian last I talked to him, so I’m crossing my fingers that the next few weeks don’t throw any dangerous surprises his way.  I don’t really think he’ll be disappointed in me for anything, but his opinion matters and I haven’t lived with him in what seems like forever so I don’t know if the husband in my imagination is accurate anymore, and it makes me uncertain.

The thing I remind myself about the fears of injury and death is that it’s not all that different from regular life.  I’m haunted by stories I hear on the news from time to time about soldiers who return safely from Iraq or Afghanistan only to be killed in a car accident on the way home, or something similar.  I remember very clearly a cold morning in February when I was still commuting 40 miles every day to violin making school hearing a news report of a man who had been killed in his car on I43.  He was in between two trucks, and when the one in front of him stopped the one behind him didn’t and he was crushed.  For some reason my first thought was that there was food in his refrigerator that he had expected to eat and never would.  There were a million details of his life waiting for him at home and he would never go back there.  None of us knows when our last day will be.

When Ian was deployed the first time and we had only six days to prepare, one of the things we had to do was sit down and go through all his important papers including his will.   He skimmed it for me and said, “It says here if I die then everything goes to you….” etc.  I didn’t pay too much attention until I heard the words, “And if you die while I’m gone….” and my jaw dropped because it had never crossed my mind that I could die while he was at war.  All I could think was, “What do you mean if I die?!  I can’t die!  I have to take care of these kids!”  But it was a good reality check.  I could be driving along between two trucks and never get to eat that lunch waiting for me in my fridge.

So my circumstance may seem extreme to someone else just living a regular life, but it’s not that much different really.  All of us are here temporarily and none of us knows how long we have.  It’s important to connect with the people we care about as often as we are able and to appreciate the time we have and use it well.

A quote that occurs to me often is, “It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.”  It’s easy to focus on the fear.  That’s primal.  What takes courage is to get past that and to focus on the love.   I can’t stop the fact that things will end, but the days I’m most proud of myself are the ones where I really stop and enjoy how glorious the love I have is.  Even if it’s just for a moment, like when my kids are showing me a caterpillar and the pure delight on their faces makes any of the mundane things I’m preoccupied with most of the time disappear.  I make a point every day to hold each of my kids and consciously appreciate how glad I am they are in the world.  Even when they are driving me crazy.

Quinn is nuzzling up next to me.  He’s able to pat around and find my arm to wrap around himself even in his sleep.  I’m the luckiest person I know.  I’m tired of fear.  I’m tired period.  I’m ready to close my laptop now.  I think I’m okay to sleep.

Fear at Ft Hood (Babble)

For the past several weeks when people have asked how I’m doing, I’ve been able to say, “It’s hard, but it’s not scary–Ian’s still just training down in Louisiana.”  But now I’m scared.

Listening to the news about the shootings at Ft Hood on the radio while running errands with the kids yesterday was unsettling to say the least.  My husband spent time at Ft Hood during his last deployment, but this time he’s at Ft Polk.   I never considered he might be in danger while still in the US.  Now I don’t know.

I felt the strange, conflicting pieces of emotion I remember from last time.  There is a low level sense of fear that is always present when my husband is deployed that is impossible to shake.  It’s like a stalker.  I’m supposed to go about my life and not worry my kids, but I have the sense that I should be looking over my shoulder.  What I’m afraid I will see if I do is uniformed soldiers with grim, sympathetic faces telling me they have bad news.  It mkes me want to scream.

Yesterday I had to pick up a package in a place I was unfamiliar with and I got lost.  Quinn was asleep and the girls were playing in the back.  I try very, very hard not to ever yell at them to be quiet when they are simply having fun, but I was on edge.  The sketchy bits of information about Ft Hood on the radio were not really informative, only frightening.  I kept telling them to keep it down, please, but Mona is incredibly squeaky.  When one of them accidentally clocked the other in the eye and there were wails and shouts from the back seat, I yelled at them to look out their respective windows and not talk to each other for awhile.  I told them I was sorry for yelling, but I needed quiet until I figured out where we were going.


There is no reason for them to know what happened at Ft Hood because it doesn’t have anything directly to do with their dad.  I’m not even sure why I’m as nervous about it as I am.

I do know that I have the same guilty feelings as before, whenever I found out that soldiers in Iraq who were hurt or killed were not my husband.  There is relief in knowing someone you love is safe, but grief that someone else is suffering.  I feel like a horrible person for being glad it was someone else, and not Ian.  I don’t know what to do about that.

My heart is breaking for those soldiers’ families today.  What a nightmare.