The Beginning of Our Deployment Story

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It's the middle of the night. I should be sleeping. But instead I lie in bed my head swirling to the point I feel dizzy. Concerns swirling. To Do list swirling. Fears swirling. Past history swirling. Concerns are things that are "problematic", Fears are things that terrify me -- in deployment those are very different things. Good things and bad things create a brain stew that drives me crazy to the point that I eventually force me out of bed to find something to distract myself. This is the second night in a row this has happened.

Well, actually if I am really honest with myself this had been happening on some level since last summer when Mr. Hart deployed. It is possible that it started happening the day he told me he had gotten orders to deploy. So that would be about 14 months now. But it ebbs and flows. I think there have been at least a few nights when I was able to get to bed at a normal time and fall asleep. I have a couple of posts on sleep planned. Sleep (lack of, nightmares, and all that is associated with it) is a topic unto itself.

I thought it would be a good time to tell you about how our deployment story started. First off, I'll tell you that we met in 2008. Mr. Hart was gone much of 2010 and most of 2011. So his coming and going on a regular basis was normal for us although it was all short trips, not anything over two months at a time. Sometimes we could even go with him or visit. But those short trips can be very difficult because you spend weeks preparing for them to leave, then they're gone, then it takes weeks to get back into a rhythm and just as you do they are rushing to leave again. Makes for a good bit of chaos.

When you add the challenges his daughter was facing, it was pretty much anxiety filled chaos most of the time. But the great life lesson we learned was to make the most of every moment Mr. Hart, Clementine and I had together. That has blessed us beyond belief and in some of the most stressful of days.

So one day fall day, I was in the car and the tall, handsome Mr. Hart called my cell phone. He seemed different but I couldn't put my finger on it. He began the conversation this way.

"Soooo, I won the lottery....", he said in a joking voice. Knowing he was not a gambler I assumed he must have impulsively bought a $1 scratch card on one of his frequent visits to 7-11 for a Coke Slurpee.

"What, did you win a dollar," I asked laughing.

"No, I won the deployment lottery," he said, chuckling. I think maybe he was laughing out of shock because this wasn't a "funny ha-ha" moment to be sure. This would turn our lives majorly upside down. I was not expecting that answer.

Just weeks before we had attended a Family Weekend for military spouses and children to learn all the things they needed to know if their service member was deployed. It was a full day of training for spouses & significant others from command, insurance, legal, religious, mental health, payroll and other departments who deal with deployed military members. None of those topics are fun topics to deal with and a full day of them was a bit overwhelming. I did come away with a big bag of goodies for spouses, two teddy bears for Clementine and a lot of printed information. I had pamphlets, books, binders phone lists, and contact information for all the resources available to military families.

By mid-day I could no longer remember "which who where" we were supposed to go for any situation that could come up, but I did learn that Fleet & Family Services was always a good place to start when you didn't know what to do. Mr. Hart had been deployed just before I met him but not in the war zones. With everything winding down and troops coming home, it seemed a long shot that I would ever be in the position of having a deployed service member on my hands. But as my first official induction into military life, I tried to soak in everything I could that family weekend. Even if he never deployed, this was all information that I needed to know in an emergency or even just to get around every day military life. Less than four weeks later all that would change.

Before I even asked him for more details, I was thinking about how this would implode so many of our plans. We had just gotten engaged seven weeks earlier after dating for more than three years. That was a big step for us and one that actually took me totally by surprise. I was not expecting a proposal at all the night it happened. What this new news did to our wedding plans I didn't want to think about. This would also be like dropping a bomb right in the middle of his daughter's life. We could lose all the ground we have made for her.

Even worse, was what this did to my hopes for having children, as I was already pushing the age limits when we first met.  An entire year lost. That was even more devastating that postponing our marriage. What if he came back and it was too late or what if something happened to him? I think this was the hardest reality for me to face. I really wanted more than one child of my own, in fact my crazy dreams were still for two pregnancies. I hoped one would be a set of twins so I could have my long wanted three children in a shorter time span. Fraternal and identical multiple births actually do run on both sides of my father's family so it was not out of the question. 

By the time I got home, all I wanted was details. Unfortunately he didn't have many. He presumed correctly that it would still be months away. What we didn't realize then was that we wouldn't have real orders for several months to come. So we continued to live in a world of half denial, reminding ourselves repeatedly that "it might not happen." Until there were orders, nothing was for sure. But the realities of what could be all became real to us that day. A couple of weeks later he left again until just days before Christmas.

As the holiday season began all I could think about is how he wouldn't be here the next year and how horrible that felt. Every celebration, every family tradition was marred some by knowing this. With the expectation of his deployment, we made plans to visit my family for Thanksgiving and his family for a full week after Christmas.

Around the beginning of the year, he finally found out there had been some sort of snafu and orders were straightened out and sent to him. Summer 2012 was our target date. By Spring 2012, we just had to endure six months of torturous anticipation which included him attending two military training programs and participating in two military exercises -- all away from home -- before his deployment. He would have just a couple of weeks from the last exercise until he was to report for deployment. And in that time we would need to arrange everything on the homefront for the coming year.

Everything changed that day he told me he won the lottery. And we've made the best of it, found happiness, dealt with the stress the best we can and we're attempting to THRIVE through this deployment. I can say for the most part we have. I am amazed at how blessed we have been.

How did your service member tell you about deployment? What got you through those weeks and months of anticipation?