Until They Return Home Safely

Warning:This post is boring, and probably not written well. I ramble on and on. Don't blame me for wasting 5 minutes of your life if you read it. Although,I will be thankful if you do read it and actually make it through the entire thing.

  Today is a sad day, I have been thinking a lot about the deployment and how I am going to manage while I go through this. When my best friend {Hay's} husband was deployed to Afghanistan we became SO much closer. We hung out, had sleep overs, talked on the phone. I was there for her. They were stationed at Ft.Lewis,WA when he returned home. Now we are over 1,000 miles away, some days it feels more like 78371281 billion miles away. She is busy with her new life of being an army wife, she is taking care of their three babies {when I say babies, I really mean it, one is 3 the other is 1 1/2 years old, the other is only a few months old}. We rarely get to talk because we are so busy with our lives. When she does get the chance to call it is normally to late over here. I am so scared of going through this deployment alone {literally alone}. When my husband leaves I will have no one. I miss her so much and I just wish that I still had her here, cause I am going to need her more than anything pretty soon. I am thankful to be familiar with this town, I went to high school here so I know people. I hate this town with a passion though, the only reason we haven't moved yet is because of my schooling.

   In fact, back in 2009 we ALMOST went active duty. My husband couldn't find a job or keep one. The economy was so bad in OK that everyone was laying off and NOT HIRING. This was so frustrating, I was in school full-time and working full time. No one would hire my husband, they say that jobs hire vets first, well its a freaking lie. Anyways, back to the active duty story, my husband went in and talked to a recruiter got all of his paperwork straightened out to transfer from the guard to active. He went to meps,and BAM we had our move date, and we were headed out for Ft.Bliss,TX. Our move date was in January 2010. I put my two weeks notice in, and we were ready to move. Well, he was scheduled to go back to MEPS a week before we were supposed to move in order to swear in and get his physical. Well low and behold when he went to MEPS the second time he was 22 pounds overweight {I guess thats what unemployment, post deployment will to do a person}. They changed our move date to May! 4 freaking months later! They wouldn't let him swear in that day, so he started his diet. He had at least 22 pounds to lose in four months. Easy right? I had put my two weeks notice in already as I mentioned above, my job found and hired a replacement the same day he went to meps and discovered he was over weight. So yes, we were BOTH out of jobs. I had given my job up and my boss wasn't going to work with me, she felt no sympathy about our position. Great boss, right? So there we are jobless and the army won't take us.Thank GOD I was in CNA classes at the time. So that is how I started working as a CNA. We were really ready to get on with our lives and just go active, move and serve our country full time. Then came the day when I got my nursing school acceptance letter. I couldn't do it, I couldn't up and move when I had a chance to go to nursing school. So I made a hard decision, I told my husband I couldn't go with him, so if he went through with it we would just make a long distance relationship work while I was in school. He wasn't having it so he decided not to go active {thank God they didn't let him swear in, in January}. Things started looking up then, he found a good job finally, I was about to be finished with all my basics and start nursing school. I went down to part-time and focused more on school.

   We thought we were almost through with the National Guard,  his last drill would be December 2010. Well we got a call in July asking if he would like to volunteer to go to Afghanistan in 2011. {What,you have got to be kidding?} He called me, and said he really wanted to go....so of course me being the good wife, I couldn't put up a fight. Besides it makes me proud to have a husband that actually wants to go and will volunteer to go. So here we are 2011, and getting ready for the big deployment. I have my stack of paperwork {life insurance, power of attorney, military clause} ready to go, and now I am lost just trying to figure out what I am going to do. We are now in the double digit days till he leaves, not very long and I am going to be a single army wife waiting alongside with many others wives for her soldier to return home safely.

Wow, I really did ramble on this post. I am sorry if you made it all the way through this. I guess this post is just my life in review for the past year. The trials we have went through on this journey we call life.