Preparedness

Just because I haven’t had a good Army wife rant in awhile, and I’m feeling it…

The late UCLA basketball coach John Wooden was once quoted as saying “always be prepared and be honest.” That quote has been in my head in the last couple weeks because I’m feeling a little bit right now that these two concepts—preparedness and honesty—are diametrically opposed when it comes to being an Army spouse.

When J left for Over There we dealt with the ever-changing deployment date. It’s next week, it’s next month. Prepare for today. Prepare for six weeks from now. Prepare and change. Prepare and change. Get told one thing, prepare for it, and have it switch. In the two months pre-deployment, I learned that the only way I could possibly be prepared for J leaving would be to not prepare at all; to accept that I had to throw the rule book straight out the window and lie to myself that I was ready to deal with whatever came my way, whenever it came my way. Basically, the only way I could be *prepared* was by lying that I was already prepared. Because there’s no way I could have really been ready for what was to come. I know that now. No way to be both prepared AND honest with yourself. (I think you’d go crazy if you tried.)

And of course, nothing truly prepares you for the actual leaving. Or the first month. As I have not so eloquently stated here in the this blog several times, the first month straight sucked. I was angry and sad and frustrated and scared (and any other emotiony-noun you can think of that doesn’t fall on the happy/excited end of the emotional spectrum.)

This has been at the forefront of my mind for two reasons in the last couple of weeks.

First, I’m starting to get the emails from the Family Readiness Group entitled “Preparing for Redeployment.” These are the emails that go out to all the Army spouses about what life is going to look like when your solider comes home and tries to reintegrate into “regular” life.

I wish I knew exactly why I resented these emails so much. There is absolutely no rational reason. These are good people trying really hard to help other really good people out. But I gotta tell ya—I get them, and I roll my eyes and passionately delete (Yes that’s right. I delete with fervor… like in the olden days [ten years ago] when you could hang up on someone by slamming the phone…that’s how I delete these messages…My own personal protest.)

It’s probably because in part I feel like I’m being sold a bill of goods. Don’t tell me it’s about time for him to come back home. You can’t promise that. You don’t know when he’s coming home. Hell, HE doesn’t know when he’s coming home. Actually, there’s like a six week window right now even from HIS standpoint, the standpoint of the one who should probably actually know when he’ll be planting his ass on an airplane. He doesn’t know. So there’s no way someone else can.

So yeah. Don’t get my hopes up that it’s soon. Don’t pretend like you know. And don’t even try to give me a *class* about what it’s going to be like to have him home again. Come on now. Really? There’s no preparing for him coming home any more than there was preparing for him to leave. And pretending that an email or a class can set a date and fill a year just seems silly to me. Who are they trying to kid here?

(And by the way, if we’re going on the record about words that I think are 100 % asinine, I’m adding “redeployment” to the list. It’s supposed to mean when he gets to come HOME. But silly me, taking the prefix “re” at face value as meaning “again”, it makes me think not that he’s coming back to me but rather is getting sent away another time. I would very much like for him to *not* be deployed again. I mean, if the service is going to arbitrarily make up a word (because, by the way, redeployment is not a word) don’t you think it should be called undeployment? He gets deployed when he gets sent Over There and then he gets undeployed when he gets to come home? Anyone? No?)

I guess what I’m saying here is that I have learned that the only way I can be honest with myself (and continue with some waning semblance of sanity) is by realizing that I’ll never really be prepared. And if you truly think that you are prepared, then I have sad and sorry news for ya there sister. You’re lying to yourself.

I understand that it’s the kind of lie that helps you get through the day. And some people may operate better that way…living in the land of pretend just to make the hours pass. I get that. I do. But I think that I would rather go the other direction—I’ll be honest with myself that there is no way I can be prepared for J’s coming home and leave it at that. (And in that vein, I sorta want J’s return to be a surprise. Like that I’ll have the absolute last possible date that he could ever possibly be coming home there in my head as the day I’ll see him, and any day earlier than that is an unexpected gift when he shows up at my office on a random Tuesday. That’s what I’m going to have to do to keep myself sane when there’s a six week window. )

I’m getting impatient. And I know J is too. And emails about him coming home are not helping either of us pass the time. (Especially when he and I realized today that I’ll be traveling out of the country on business for ten days *right* around the time he will likely be returning. How’s that for a kick in the ass? He mentioned us sharing a high-five in the airport as I left and he came home. I wanted to throw up.)

The other reason I have been thinking about this idea of preparedness is because I recently met a lovely family who lives here in the city who is loaning Dad-of-family out for a year deployment beginning in January. I was introduced to the Mom-of-family because she didn’t have any local military friends and our mutual friend thought it would be a good idea to connect her with someone.

I left our meeting broken-hearted on her behalf. It reminded me so much of the rational way I had tried to approach J leaving. It brought back the sting of the beginning of the our time apart.

She was trying so hard to make sense of it. Trying to figure out what life was going to look like…how they would cope…how they would prepare. Mom-of-family talked about service-spouse classes she was taking to learn everything she would need to know when Dad-of-family left for a year. The whole time she spoke, I just wanted to hug her. “She’s got no idea,” I thought to myself later that day as I reflected on our meeting. And there was nothing I could do to prepare her.

But you know what, she’ll learn what she needs to make the days pass. And maybe that will be preparedness, and maybe it will be learning to lie to herself. But she’ll keep on living and learning and making the absolute best she can of her days. It’s all that any of us can do.

I’m trying to do that right now, too: make the absolute best of my days. Maybe it’s all this undeployment talk (yup, I’m just going to start using it and see if it catches on). Maybe it’s the holidays. Maybe it’s that we’ve been wedding planning recently. Maybe it’s that I’m just about at my limit. But it’s been a hard couple of weeks, weeks that yet again, I was not prepared to face.

So maybe we can’t be prepared and simultaneously honest. Or at least I’m not sure* I* can when it comes to this. As Goethe said, “Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.” So I guess that’s all I can do. Keep on living, prepare for change, and lie to myself for a few more months that I’m good at it.