Day 151 - not one of the funny ones

And Id just like to say ... watch your left hand turns.

Don't you love how everything seems to go wrong when they're away?

Well - lets be real. I was thinking about this earlier, and even IF something were to go wrong when my husband was home, Id STILL be the one to fix it. But Allen is at least really great at playing nursemaid ..... and after the accident I was in 2 days ago, even though I may have had to direct him through every step of the insurance process, and who to call and when, he still would have been very good about changing the DVD out for me while I laid on the couch with some Starbucks (that he had fetched, don't get it twisted).

Instead, after the crash, I got on the phone with the insurance, then proceeded to work on my internship. And then cleaned the house. There was no sitting around trying to "rest" or "relax". That may be for the better, but let me tell you civilian ladies something - when you sit around and bitch about your husbands or boyfriends, there are reasons why those of us whose husbands are deployed will say " And the big deal is????? Because I don't get it.".

Anyways, these things really never happen when the guys are home. Its like there is someone up there, possibly the Patron Saint of Military Wives who take every potential catastrophe, including:

• The mortgage company not receiving payment and trying to foreclose on your house when you SWEAR TO GOD you paid the right person 40 times(Basic '07)

• Packing up your entire house when you've only been married for 2 months and having to sort through years of someones idea of packing being "stick it in bags in the garage and Ill deal with it when I eventually marry some poor sucker who will do it for me" (AIT '07)

• Being stuck at the airport because your ride flaked and you don't know that many people where you are stationed yet to call for a ride (Trojan Training '08)

• Your husbands car window being smashed, his GPS being stolen (Mirror Image '08)

• Catching your husbands best friends wife faking a miscarriage to the pregnancy she also made up (Brigade FTX '08)

• Getting caught in a months worth of snow when you are FROM THE SOUTH and drive a TINY CAR. Ending up stranded most of the month (DIA Training, '08)

• Finding out that deployment is in 3 months .... from the NEWS ... while you cant talk to them for 2 weeks .... (NTC '09)

And please let those only serve as very loose examples of things that can go wrong.

So anyways, this Patron Saint obviously takes every bad and terrible thing that you could have to deal with, and puts them off however many months until your husband is gone again.

This will inevitably lead you to, for just one moment, anger at him. Even if its not fair, there is still a part of you that wonders why "everyone else" has someone to lean on or to fall back on, and you don't (which is one great thing about being in this community for the duration of deployment - because everyone is in the same boat, and you don't ever feel like you are the only one ...).

Then it leads you to being sad. Most of us get through the day by pushing our anger, sadness, loneliness to the side, so that we can go on. Someone asked me the other day if I thought it was bad that she didn't think about her husband being in a combat zone. I said absolutely not! Us worrying over here and falling apart certainly doesn't do our husbands any good. But some days, like when you are standing in the pouring rain next to a smashed up car, you might have more trouble than before pushing all the bad thoughts out of your head. For about ten seconds I wanted to put my arms across my chest, stomp my foot, and say "I want my husband. NOW".

If I thought for one second that it would work ... I would have done it.

And then its not like you can just call them up and say ... "hey honey ... you know how you always say I drive about as well as an Asian woman? Well .....". Instead you have to wait for them to call. So you walk around for about 8 hours going "Hes gonna kill me, hes gonna kill me, hes gonna kill me".

So then when the MP has to take his information down ("His work number?" "He doesn't have one" "EVERYONE has a work number" "Hes in Afghanistan. Do you want to call there? Please feel free to call the switchboard, I'm positive they'll direct you right to him"), I told him to put a little star on the side.

"For what?"
"Because when my husband inevitably kills me for smashing our new car, you'll already have the suspects description"

This guy really had no sense of humor. At all. Because that? Was funny.

But then you get surprised sometimes. Because deployments really put into perspective whats important. And after Allen made sure that I was okay, he said he could honestly care less about the car, or the money. That the only thing that would ever affect him is losing me in his life, and anything else was just not worth worrying over.

I guess deployment isn't all bad .... though CPT Bell tried to insist that I should go to the doctor anyways.

I told Allen to tell him that I said "not to confuse his rank with my authority".