Our story

Well, I can now officially say that I am the wife of a deployed soldier. Feels strange. I miss him like crazy already. I woke up at 3 AM this morning, and immediately saw the empty side of the bed that he has occupied for so many years, and I just felt sick at the thought of how long I have to look at it that way. Saying goodbye to him was the hardest moment of my life. I have never, ever felt such pain. There were so many tears, all day long. When we were leaving the house to take him in, I felt like my heart would pound out of my chest. stopped in the den on the way to the garage and just looked at him and choked out "No, no, I don't want to! I can't!". We stood there and both cried and then he took my handand we forced ourselves to walk out the door of our home together for the last time for a year. I was able to text back and forth with him throughout some of the night. But as soon as the plane took off, we lost all cell phone communication. He won't be able to communicate with me through his cell phone again until his deployment is over. Knowing he is not going to have a cell phone as of tomorrow is so much more painful to me than I expected it to be. He has gone on many trips over the years, but he has always been at least somewhat available to me by cell phone. When he goes on those trips, I am always glued to my phone, waiting to see his name pop up. But now I know that it won't for a very long time. I feel like I've been completely cut off from him. I don't know when I will hear from him again. Presumably not until he gets to a base in Afghanistan that has phones or email-whether it be the one he will stay on, or not. I expect it to be a few days at least. We are doing ok. We are very, very sad, but it has to be that way, I guess. After he left, Eric sent me a text that read "the hourglass has flipped, and now it's counting down to something good". So very true! The build-up to this was very long and hard, but it's over now. It's on now, and we get to start the countdown to his return.