I first wrote this blog not long after my husband left. Yes, he has come home, but I still want to share the many emotions and issues I went through while he was deployed. Thus…my struggle with asking for help:
When anger grips me with icy hands, my knee-jerk reaction is to want a place to assign my rage. I want to kick, punch, scream. I want some way to release this demon. The truth is, there is no constructive place to put it. He volunteered. I choose to stay married. We choose to work through this. So where to put the rage?
And, my rational side understands that my body is going through a reaction. A normal process. But giving in to this portion of a deployment is so hard for me. I am not an angry person. I don’t enjoy the rage. The random screaming at strangers. I don’t like feeling like I hate everyone. And everything.
But I still know it will happen. And still expect it. And then, when it does sneak up on me, I wonder how I didn’t stop it. Shouldn’t I be better at this by now? Isn’t this chaos normal by now?
The sad thing is, this feels normal: living an abnormal life. We rotate and revolve around a deployment. Waiting to fall into the gyre of anger. The quick flash of rage. Somewhere in my revolution, I journeyed full circle back to this: trying to find a way out of this suffocating pit.
This time, I came armed and ready. I have an arsenal waiting and I am ready to fire at will. I am in counseling. At first, I thought this was a sign of weakness. I felt it. The whole pull of the stigma: “I am an army wife. I don’t need help!” Why is it so much easier to give advice than to take it? “Get counseling. It is free. It is there for us. You are normal.” I tell everyone. Wait….me need it? Pshh . Nah.
Then, I stepped into her office. And she didn’t pity me. Didn’t tell me I should cry. But I did. I bawled. For the next two meetings, I pulled tissue from the box: that soft WHOOF of fiber against cardboard reminding me of my humanity. The whole time, I just kept thinking, “Where is all this coming from?” How could I not know where it comes from?
Perhaps from the constant whirling life of goodbye and reintroductions? Figuring out if our marriage will make it and how we can get through another separation? It is too much weight for any of us to bear.
My second battle technique was putting my daughter in counseling. She is obviously a tougher nut to crack. But, slowly, she is thawing. Drawing images of happy faces. Sad faces. Slowly, she is talking. Trusting another person to be her ally. And, she is surviving.
This common bond we now share, going to our “feelings doctor and getting our heart medicine” has helped us more than I could have ever dreamed. We now have a truth-telling club where no matter how ugly our truths are, we can share with each other. Granted, my truth-telling is kept to a very G- rated version, but when in that club meeting, anything kid-related, goes.
We do anything and everything we can to live. To get past our pain. To feel like our lives haven’t stopped. We attempt to be normal. And try to pretend that isn’t abnormal.
But I feel abnormally alone without him. And I’m not sure how to make a life without him feel normal.
But learning how to move outside of my comfort zone and my “Army wife” exterior to ask for help, and feeling like a stronger person when I accept it, finally has begun to feel normal.
