Survival

I would like to say that I have conquered this deployment.  I would like to write here that I came through this deployment, and handled it, and took care of my shit. 

If I put this into writing, I would utterly be lying. 

A few weeks after I wrote my last blog, everything came undone.  The light of my life, the center of my universe, my little girl, crumbled.  Night terrors started, first one, then all through the night she would wake up crying and screaming.  When she would sleep, she would sleep walk, I would find in various places in the house, like a tiny statue.  She stopped eating, and I would feed her pediasure to keep her from getting sick, while she started to lose weight.

A few months into the deployment, I broke, utterly and completely, when she sat in my lap, got nose to nose with me and asked me if her Daddy had died.  That was the moment, when this deployment broke me. 

My own pain was nothing, but my child’s pain is everything.  I could do nothing to fix her pain.  Her entire life, I have been able to fix it, to put a band-aid on, to soothe a high fever with a bath, or an upset tummy with gripe water.   I learned the hardest lesson of motherhood, that there are some things you cannot do for your children, at a time when I was at my weakest.

So I hung on, tied a knot in the end of my rope, prayed for strength during the night when I quit sleeping too, and in the morning, fortified myself with coffee.  I also withdrew from a huge chunk of my normal life, I’ve been a social hermit for months.  While I am pretty open with most things, the most painful I keep close to my heart. 

There were days when I swore the clock had completely slowed down, but time passed.  I looked up and spring was long gone, summer was passing, and fall was coming.  For every rough day where we were curled up watching movies, there was another where we adventured, where we colored and painted, laughed and giggled in the grass, where we lived.  Somewhere along the way, her and I learned to sleep again, regained our appetites, we found the peace we both had desperately needed.

I set out to teach my child that in the darkest hours, you find strength and carry on.  I realize now, I taught her to survive, to hold on until you find enough to really carry on.  But there is strength in that too.  Maybe I taught her that just surviving is ok too.  

~Jennifer