I hate this part.

I don't know why they call it heartbreak.  It feels like every other part of my body is broken too. 

 ~Missy Altijd

I know this place.  I hate this place.  This in between, he’s not gone, time is running out, so much to do so little time to do it in place. 

I thought, months ago, that I would come into this place better than I did the first time.  That touch of arrogance that runs through me reared up, and I thought I would handle it better.  I am a veteran wife, not the scared young bride I was.  I was badly mistaken.

Instead, as I saw the flight times, saw the schedule, laid out in a well-thought out, carefully written brief, I was right back in this place again.  I am no longer the veteran wife, who does not blink as her husband packs, who knows where everything is, who to call when, and what to expect.  I fought the urge to cry (actually, I blinked back tears repeatedly), my palms got sweaty, it felt like a giant was standing on my chest, the room shrank and then expanded, and then spun a few times, in the ultimate screw you.  And I am that young bride again, that brand-new wife, scared. 

It took everything I had to keep from standing up and yelling “I’m not ready!!” at the top of my lungs, to keep from pleading with command to let him stay behind, to beg for a day, two days, a week, something, anything.  In truth, I would not be ready with an extra few days, a week, or even a month.  I was not ready for him to leave the moment he got back.

I won’t ever be fully ready.  I doubt there will be a time, facing down a deployment, when I will have everything in place; when phone numbers are written down, paperwork is in its proper place, when I know dates and addresses, and I feel ready.  There is truly no preparation for that moment, when he walks away. 

The organizational freak in me took over when I got home, and started sorting through paperwork, filing away stuff we will need, keeping stuff I need now handy, writing things down, making lists, going over old lists.  Even as I sorted through the seeming mountain of stuff I got home with, I knew my actions were really a band-aid over a bigger wound.  Getting everything ready, having all the things I’m supposed to have, I will not prepare me for what is coming.

So I sit here… clinging to the time we have left.  Bracing for the impact of deployment, knowing that impact hits me like a steam train.  Time is dwindling down to departure day, and I will never be ready for that.

~Jennifer