When my husband first got his orders for his third deployment, the first thing that went through my mind was a percentage. How many times can someone go over there and still come home?
Once he walked through the doors of the redeployment ceremony, that question was answered, but new ones began to fill my mind.
Who came home?
What helps me through a deployment, what keeps me breathing is hope. Hope that he will make it home. Hope that our love will be enough. And hope that blood, bombs, and constant vigilance hasn’t stripped him to the point that I can no longer recognize the man I married.
I married a hippy. A charming bearded, long-haired, fight-the-man bohemian who just happened to be in the army reserves. Then active duty.
For years now, that man has been gone. Deployed. Shot at. Bombed.
And I have been living on hope. Hope that somewhere deep inside that soldier–that man who has seen too much, felt too much, and learned too much—there was still a young vibrant hippy who believed in earth. Peace. Happiness. And a man who smiled despite the odds.
I have been missing him for years. Praying to see him, just one ounce of him, so that I can cling to the hope that no matter how many separations we endure, we will beat those percentages.
And that hope, that desire, nearly destroyed us.
A dear friend told me recently, “the man who left will never be the man who comes home. You must mourn who you were and put that to rest and decide if who you are now is a couple you are willing to fight for. Yes, you will see moments, flickers of who he was. And that will help you through.”
It made me cry. Because the man I saw before me gripped his chest in pain. Woke in the middle of the night, yelling at me in Iraqi. Glazed over when a memory seized him. And yelled randomly when he couldn’t assimilate into my world.
The truth is, I have been holding on to hope for years that he would go back. Back to who he was. Back to who we were. And back to a life that felt carefree and completely perfect for me.
And while I held on to that hope and that image, thinking that was what would get us through, life and deployments changed us. And I refused to accept that.
Because what if the new “us”—the new “me” and “he”—didn’t mesh?
What if we had learned to be without each other so long, we were no longer united?
And then that same dear friend said, “You must return to the things that cemented you as a couple and use those touchstones to move forward.”
And so we did.
We went back to the place where we married. Beneath that tree, the perfect sycamore tree that witnessed our first kiss, our first touch as man and wife, the beginning of our life.
It was beautiful. And weathered. And older. Taller.
The leaves were vibrant at places, and eaten in others. My heart pounded, thumped, and lurched in my chest.
His eyes, no longer naïve and innocent, held a new light. Not the sparkle of youth, but the desire of a man who has learned to love despite hate.
His hands, once young and soft, were rough and weathered. They held my hand as we stood in the shade of our tree, and I felt a strength– a fierce need to touch, that never existed before.
There, next to the roaring water, I saw not the boy’s memory I had clung to for so long, but the man who had grown and evolved.
It was nearly enough for me—enough to let go of the past version of us. Enough to start looking toward the future.
But one thing hung in the balance.
For years I have missed the hippy I met. The man who cared nothing about material things. Nothing about living by someone else’s rules. That was the man I couldn’t put to rest. The one I couldn’t let go of. The one I clung to in desperate fear that he may have buried so deep we would never find our “spark” again.
The very moment I let go, the instant I gave it up and decided that I would move forward, no matter what I had to leave behind. The moment I promised that I would stay, would love even if the “him” I married was forever altered, it happened.
“Want to put some bumper stickers on the truck and buy some patchouli?” he asked.
Tears jumped into my eyes. For years I have lived in fear, torturous fear eating my heart like a blackened cancer, that we may never find our way. May never see an avenue to help us move forward past all we had endured.
The moment I chose to let it all go; to decide to move forward with the love I have rather than the one I once knew, there it was: hope.
Hope given to me like a gift wrapped in crimson.
We are still in there. Not the same. Not the people we were.
But we are the people we choose to be from now on. Together.
And while we must let go and grieve who we were before, it isn’t as terrifying as I once imagined. Because when I loosened the vice grip and let go, then we actually had a chance to fly again.
