Plan For Homecoming Exhaustion

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Here's a little tip from our homecoming week experience. Expect to be exhausted. Your returning service member will be exhausted from deployment, the time change and jet lag. That's pretty much a given. What surprised me was how tired everyone on the homefront, we who welcomed him home were. Everyone on the homefront will be exhausted from all the excitement, anticipation and likely a lot of house cleaning and other rushed preparations at the end of deployment.

My husband was taking three or four naps a day and sleeping only half of the night the first week or so. He would be wide awake about 2 a.m. That meant a lot of times I was awake too because he's not so good at being quiet in the middle of the night. We all took long naps in the afternoons. We were just one tired, worn our bunch. Many an afternoon the three of us would crawl onto our bed and crash for a couple of hours or more. Four hour naps for my husband and our little one were not uncommon.

So plan that into your schedule as you look at homecoming. Don't pack the schedule too tightly or expect too much from everyone every day. Leave a lot of flexibility for resting up, especially for your service member. Give them a few days to catch up with things before planning parties, events and places they have to be. It's good to let them ease back into things at home at a pace they are comfortable with. It will be a challenging readjustment period.

I found myself being fiercely protective of my husband his first couple of weeks home. I wanted him to rest and take care of himself. Beyond that I was very protective of him and his energies. I didn't make any public announcement about him being home. I just let him rest a lot, made him a lot of good meals and we did a lot of cuddling as a family.

Take care of your service member, yourself and your family first and foremost. Celebrations and big events can wait. Plan on a big emotional release and being tired when that happy end of deployment comes.