Thanks for bumping me up to the top for a few days at least. Wow. I don’t recognize ANYONE here, except for Built for Speed. I didn’t have a lot of time, but even CatFan is not near the top.
Things here trudge along day by day. The days are long, but the weeks are fast. When I feel bad about stuff, I get snapped back into reality when the MEDEVAC helicopters fly in over our building at treetop level. The theater hospital is right across the street. They come in in pairs all day long, 5 or more times per day. Usually they have soldiers on them who are really hurt or Iraqi civilians or worse…little kids. So that it puts it all into perspective. I feel a tremendous satisfaction from my work here, opinion about the war aside. It is something that will change me forever.
On the home front, I continue to communicate with my kids as often as I can, and write several times a week. Postcards and emails. W. has sent a coupe emails asking for my cell phone, which I sent for my son…no response from her about anything. I did call the other day to talk to my kids. She answered the phone and was pleasant and didn’t seem to immediately rush me off. Whatever. I would think by now….I’m going on a year of separation next week that if something would light a fire under her maybe by now it would have happened. But as a good friend of mine said here the other day: “You never know. In 18 months away, you’ll change and she’ll change”, so who knows. Most days I’m OK, but occasionally, I’ll think ahead to the way it was before I mobilized last year, where I was living alone, was lonely all the time, and my son and daughters were my best friends in the world. I think about all the holidays to come, and the lonely nights on the horizon. I compare that to 20 years of family life. Fun vacations, sitting on my deck looking out over the woods in my backyard, and it’s so hard to think of a different lifestyle.
I read a quote once that said “divorcing another person is one of the cruelest emotional things one human can do to another”, and it really resonated with me. I really don’t want to be alone. The way it was before was so disjointed and emotionally exhausting. I would pick up my son every day and stay at my old house on Tuesday and Thursday and make them dinner, and then go back to my shi**y garage apartment, while my family stayed in the $700,000 house that I paid for. I don’t really know what I’ll do………It makes me sad beyond belief to see my family go through this. I get a vote, but it’s not the one that counts. The day I left for good, she took me to the airport, and as my kids were crying, she couldn’t even muster up a goodbye or a “be careful” I HAD THREE KIDS AND 20 YEARS WITH HER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry I can’t write more often, but my days are unbelievable busy.
