Viewing Deployment as a Loss

The month of February was a very hard month for me. I felt like everything had come crumbling down on me. I felt tired. I felt weary. I felt exhausted with my life that seems to be throwing challenge after challenge at me last year and this year. Some days I would feel so bad and be struggling greatly emotionally, even more so than I did when I lost my daughter. And one of the most frustrating things that I didn't understand why I suddenly felt as bad as I did.

I found myself moody, irritable, and crying all the time. Sure I had things going on in my life that were contributing to the way I felt: still grieving the deaths of my daughter and father, moving from the home and friends I came to have in Alabama to a new home and community, learning of my husband's deployment, being pregnant again after our loss, and so on. But I wasn't just stressed about these things. I new there was something more going on, I just couldn't figure out what it was.

And then I read something that gave me my answer for why I was as emotional and depressed as I was.

I was mourning.

I wasn't just continuing the mourning process with Hailey and my dad, I was mourning another loss. I was mourning 3 losses at the same time and they were compounding each other.

I didn't realize what the third loss was that I was mourning until I read this article online.

I had been mourning the loss of my husband.

Now let me explain myself. No my husband is not dead, no my husband is not terminally ill, or anything of that sort. What my husband is, is deploying to Afghanistan for a year.

I wasn't viewing his pending deployment as a time of being separated by distance. I was viewing it as a literal loss in my life.

My mind became engulfed in the ideas that once he deploys I will be alone. I won't have my best friend with me. I won't be able to talk to him every day. I won't be able to do things with him. I will have to go through this pregnancy and (God-willing) this birth and raising a newborn alone. I won't have him. I will have to do everything alone. I will go from being married to being alone and single and perhaps a single parent. My mind focused on alone, and I somehow unknowingly began to view my husband's  deployment as a loss.

In my mind, I had lost my daughter, my dad, and a year later I was losing my husband. My mind started to question God, Why are you taking all of the people I love away from me?

I was completely treating his upcoming deployment like I was grieving over losing him.

I'm so thankful I stumbled on that article to make me realize what I was doing. But I'm more thankful for what else the article made me realize.

These words:

"Even when he was deployed, he was still my husband. Although I miss him when he is gone, that is a very different type of absence than that felt by someone who is widowed or separated. We still have our love and our mutual support and our commitment to working together on our relationship and our parenting... Geographical separation is not the same as separation by divorce or death."

I read that and a light bulb went off in my head. I was completely treating the scenario like it was a death. But it's not. He is still my husband. We will still support each other. We will still love each other. We will still have each other. Just not like we've been used to. I still have my husband, even when he's deployed, we will just have a geographical separation. Now of course there is the chance with any deployment that there could be real loss, but an Army wife can't go there, and that's not what any of this was about with me.

Reading this article gave me immediate relief. No exaggeration. It gave me the reminders and perspective I needed to have. Because of this, I am more ready to face this deployment and to give the support and love to my husband that he needs right now.