Surviving deployment

First of all, thanks to friends and family for reading and commenting. It's such a treat to read your kind thoughts! Miss you all!



I'm appologizing in advance for this (and probably several future) post(s). It will probably be of no help to anyone but me. I do enough speaking about the effects of deployment on families and children, that I thought I would take some time to consolidate my thoughts while they are still fresh. So, this post is about what I've learned from deployment '06-'07.



This post has several subtitles:
You can never have too many friends (and family!),
Find out who your friends are,
Walking the tightrope


As independent as I am, I could never have survived the responsibility of raising three kids on my own without help. There are just too many things that go awry. There are meetings that I wouldn't have been able to attend without someone to watch the kids. Football, soccer, and baseball games and practices on opposite sides of post at the same time; sick kids, doctor's appointments, Nathan's broken arm (and the resulting 5 hour hospital stay). Beyond just the needed help with the kids, my friends and family were there to send me books, to relate to what I was experiencing, to offer support and prayers. What would I have done without you? Lately I've been thinking about my support systems as a giant, many-layered safety net, with each friend or family member making up a spoke or square in the pattern. The wider and stronger the net and its connections, the more stability and safety it provides for me and my family. The less likely I am to go mad from loneliness or even hurt my kids (there's a new study out talking about deployment and an increased risk for child abuse). Of course, I can talk about this NOW, at the end of the deployment. You'd think I would have learned the first time that it is so much easier to walk the deployment tightrope if you are confident of a strong safety net to catch you when you fall. Some lessons are hard to learn, or unlearn, if you like. I think I have persisted in my 2 year old wisdom - "I can do it myself!" to the point of stupidity. Even at the beginning of this past deployment, when I should have known better, I insisted in trying to load and unload my new dryer without enlisting the help of any strong male neighbors. It was not until I had the thing loaded in my SUV, sitting in my driveway that I knew I was in over my head. I ran up to my neighbor, Hank, desperate for someone to bail me out. Hank wasn't home, but his wife Becky was. She was the one to help me unload the dryer, move out the old one, and hook up the new one. Who'd have thought this very gentle, Southern lady (who always had hair and makeup done to perfection) was so handy with a wrench? It was the first of many revelations that showed me not only how I couldn't do everthing by myself, but that I was surrounded by people who were happy to help.
A common topic for discussion at church is service - giving service, receiving service. Not only is it nicer to give than to recieve, it is easier. It's easier to be the one to make dinner for a family who has just had a baby, than to admit that I am floundering and need some help. Fortunately, deployment provides many opportunities to learn to accept service. The learning curve is a little slow or prolonged (well it was for me due to my own stubbornness). At first I was guilty of the "ledgerbook" ideology. I tried to return babysitting for babysitting, meal for meal, a plate of cookies for a ride to take the car in for service. Soon I found I just couldn't keep up. It seemed that my need for help pretty quickly outpaced my ability to give back. (Now there's a good Relief Society lesson). I was humbled. Really, deployment is a lesson in humility. It becomes quickly apparent where your weaknesses lie. It becomes pretty apparent where you don't measure up. This is where deployment changes you, really marks you so that you are different at the end from the person you started as at the beginning. All those moments of weakness, the times you yell at the kids for no good reason, the times the house is a total disaster and you stay up late reading a novel, the times you aren't emotionally available when the people around you are huring or angry. Those low times for me will not completely be erased from my memory - they'll stick around, my personal deployment scars. But then there are the care packages that arrive in the mail, the neighbor who takes the kids for a whole afternoon, the telephone calls from family and friends. That's when you really come to understand the true meaning of Grace: Undeserved kindness and generosity, love. I found myself singing "you find out who your friends are" a lot. Somehow it's having to go through the low times that really allows you to really experience the love of family and friends. It's the best band-aid in the world. By the end of the deployment, I was able to take the frequent hits to my tightrope stability without so much panic. I knew that no matter what happened, my own safety net would be there to catch me, to wrap around me and comfort me. So when my two younger kids freak out because they don't want to go to TJ's piano lesson, and my neighbor is happy to watch them for me, it's one battle I don't have to fight. A bit of energy saved for the time I will really need it. My family and friends have asked how I did it, how I survived. It's pretty simple, you made me strong.