A Deployment Ends
How deleting reminders is the final hurdle.
by Nikki Larson
My husband is home, and we’re going through that “post-deployment thing” where we try and re-establish our roles and divide the household chores. He’s on leave, so during the day while I’m at work all sorts of crazy stuff is going on, like kitchen cabinet rearranging. I can’t find anything in my kitchen anymore! At least cooking is an adventure now … I feel like Columbus, setting out to explore new territory and claiming new land for Spain.
We’re both having problems sharing the bed with each other. He’s used to sleeping in the middle of a twin bed, and I’m used to having a king-sized mattress mostly to myself. Each morning, he wakes up with new bruises and doesn’t know where he got them (I have sharp elbows and am not afraid to use them …) Our Scottish Terrier, Angus, took up residence on my husband’s side of the bed during this deployment. Poor little Angus has had to shift his post-deployment napping paradigm, too.
He did another thing I have mixed feelings about – he deleted all the answering machine messages. All of them, including the ones he left while he was deployed and I wasn’t home to take the calls. He deleted the two calls from the Bangor, Maine USO when he was enroute to Baghdad the day he left over a year ago.
During dinner on the day he did that, he was teasing me about keeping 15 old messages on the machine, all from him. I couldn’t tell him the truth about why I kept them because that would just highlight his mortality and he’d feel bad that I worried so much about him; so I told him I kept them so that I could hear his voice whenever I missed him. That was partly true, but certainly not the real reason for hanging on to year-old voicemail.
As military wives, we all know why we don’t delete those messages. We live with the constant fear that those messages may be the only record, or the last time we will hear his voice. Deleting those messages is symbolic of something, but I’m not sure what; I can’t quite put my finger on those emotions quite yet. But with the push of the delete button, they are gone; and so is this past deployment.