Tall Skinny Half-Caf No Shots, Please...

We married young; fluffed and full of optimism. We were just two kids from a middle class background in one of those rare towns where middle class could pass for upper class and our dreams weren’t mitigated by things like thoughts of dying young. We moved for him to begin his military obligation, and life quickly showed with blunt force that we are not in control. I could describe us as changed as a result of the past three years, but in truth it is more like we are mutated. I look at my contemporaries and am struck by the lack of awareness that a war is even being fought. As long as the local Starbucks Barista can properly froth their lattes, many people feel remarkably secure. Sometimes in quieter moments I try to remember a simpler time but ultimately my thoughts return to long nights of patchy sleep and desperate prayers to bring my husband home. No news is good news so I had a 3AM ritual of checking the news to ensure a couple more hours of sleep. That time was to me a time of suspended animation: trying to live and parent without making anything too foreign for my husband. I lived with an invisible tether keeping my cell phone within arms reach. This reached levels of absurdity, as I couldn’t go to the bathroom without carrying my cell phone with me. I once took a call from him (and I was thrilled not to have missed it) on a massage table because I was loathe to leave the phone for even one minute. The masseuse was gracious even though I’m certain it must have been unusual for her to have a client crying and saying, "I love you. I miss you so much."
He is home. Back some ten months from an arduous deployment. It has been ten months now, about the length of time that he was gone and we are just now resurfacing from the stress of it. I still call him up at work sometimes just because I can. It feels good to have a number to dial; to have some element of control. It feels good to not have to wait on his calls or feel the devastation of a missed call as I did on Valentines Day. I cannot pretend what it must’ve felt like to be in Fallujah during the Fallujah offensive. To be caring for wounded Marines, fearing for your own safety with (as he later revealed to me) a letter to me telling me to marry another should he die and a letter to our daughter, J****, telling her how much he would’ve loved to see her grow up. The thought alone is almost too much to bear. C acknowledges that he can’t imagine it from my end either: The cries of our child for him, the newspapers and magazines speculating on how the Fallujah offensive of November ’04 would go and just the oppressive unknown.
Life is taking on a semblance of normalcy again. I sleep well. For C it is not as easy. Some things only rear their heads at night when compartmentalizing is not possible. I feel like we dodged a bullet. Were we lucky? Blessed? We are moving on. We are planning and hopeful for the future, but there is piquant reminder every time we watch the news, or every time another battalion leaves, that causes me to feel the nervous knot in my stomach again and reminds me how fortunate I am.