Thursday, March 18, 2010

Careful What You Wish For

I have a kinda-sorta secret and it is driving me nutso. I'm not good at keeping secrets. I'm just too damn honest. Besides, it is a kinda-sorta secret that my husband and I share and want to talk about sometimes. And occasionally we blurt.

In fact, my mom figured out our kinda-sorta secret by overhearing something completely innocuous that I said when she was two rooms away.

My husband is deploying again.

We've been expecting it because he is long overdue. We were just hoping that we wouldn't get just a couple of weeks notice again like we did when he went to Iraq.

So now the opposite is happening. He is going to that other desert place next September. That's the longest lead time we have ever had before a deployment. Or a move, or anything!

And it's actually made things harder, I swear.

He still has a bunch of training he needs to do this summer, so he'll be gone half of June, half of July and some of August. But he doesn't know exactly when he's leaving yet so he doesn't want to tell the kids.

Plus, three (to six) months is a long time for them to be stressed about Daddy leaving. It just feels like it is too early to tell them. So we have to be careful what we say.

I hate that. They're smart enough to figure out that something is up anyway. They've been through this four times before. They know the signs. It feels like it is against our value system to withhold information from them. We're walking a line here.

But also, my husband doesn't want to tell his mother yet. He just doesn't want to deal with her worry. I think it is...funny, or maybe weird that he is more worried about telling her than he was about telling me.

So, I can't really tell anyone. (Except the blog-o-sphere) I'm not really worried or stressed yet. But occasionally I do think Oh man! Soon I'll be doing this all alone again.

If it is even possible, I am now even more grateful for the way our life has settled this year. And that I turned down that symphony job. And that I am slowly but surely making some friends here.

Ah, sigh. My warrior is heading back to be a warrior again. Sixth grade and third grade will forever be remembered as years when Daddy was gone. And I'll start sleeping diagonally across our bed again before too long.

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