I spent months getting ready.
Journaling and planning and worrying and making sad playlists. We were ready for “D-Day” — our first deployment. At least as ready as a family can be for an event like this.
Along with the usual deployment anxiety and general sadness, the guilt also rolled over me in waves during this season. Guilt for not spending enough time with him. For feeling frustrated or disagreeing with him. Guilt for arguing or not giving him my full attention all of the time. Most of all, for agreeing to a work trip to Colorado just a few weeks before he was scheduled to ship out. (A good wife would be preparing and spending as much time with her husband as possible, right?) To be clear, this was guilt that I was fully responsible for; my husband did literally nothing to make me feel this way. In fact, he tried to comfort me. He was the one deploying AND the one doing the comforting.
Toward the end of my work trip (which was awful, by the way, because I couldn’t get over how terrible I felt for leaving him) he called me and told me that “D-Day” was postponed indefinitely. There was an electrical issue with the ship and they weren’t able to leave the port until it could be fixed. Right away I felt a new kind of guilt. This time because my first thought was, “I wasted so much time feeling anxious and depressed about this and now it’s not even happening…?”
Months of this sadness and preparing for the big see-you-later — all for nothing?
For so long, I allowed my little boat to be tormented by the tides of this impending deployment. My eyes were on the waves in the distance and I scrambled to prepare for the day they’d crash over me, all the while the sea beneath me was calm and warm. All of the sweet days that could have been easy and soft were covered instead with my own manifested caul of foreboding and loss. I was looking so hard and trying so desperately to build every bright moment that I missed all of it.
So today, be the river rock. Waves and tides smooth it over time, but day to day it remains steadfast and unchanged. Close your eyes and feel what’s around you; pay no attention to the waves on the horizon.
They’re not here yet.