The countdown

 I am reading a really good book right now,    (surprise, surprise!) Leota's Garden, by Francine Rivers. One of the lines near the beginning really hit me yesterday. "She couldn't speak. It wasn't that she didn't have any words; it was that she had too many."

 I feel that way often right now. This week has been rough. It is the same every time Andy deploys, and since this is the third time (fourth is you count his year in Korea) you would think I would be an old pro by now. In fact, if you count the goodbye of his mid-tour visit home, in which I gave birth to Zion, I am pretty sure I have spent more time saying goodbye to him then I have spent with him. At least it feels that way some days. 

 And there are moments when it is easy to forget about being noble and brave - forget about being strong and wise - forget about being part of "the team". 

 

 In the middle of dinner tonight, when Andy was teasing our sons, teaching them to flex their muscles, and how to compare whose were bigger  - I simply lost the battle. 

 Six months suddenly seemed unbearable. 

 I smiled, swallowed my chicken and rice, and declared Canaan's muscles "almost as big" as Daddy's. 

 But inside, I think I broke. 

 I refuse to do a countdown - I don't want to torture myself in that much detail. But my brain still calculates: weeks, days, hours, minutes. I can't shut it off. Oh, how I want to shut it off. 

 We are somewhere around the five week mark. How much can I squeeze in with him in five weeks? Minus 10 hour work days 5 days a week, plus a Sat. college class, study time, packing, and the lovely emergency call backs when a plane "has an incident" and everyone who has so much as breathed on that plane in the last 24 hours gets called back in for a drug test (at 7pm at night, after working all day long). Which leaves me with, well, nothing. 

 I am trying so hard to not be ugly, but right this minute, I am so very capable of being ugly. Because, right this minute, I am not an AF wife - I am just a wife. 

 Tomorrow will be better, and I will probably get on here and apologize, but right now I just have to vent. Overall, I am so willing to share. He volunteered for the Air Force, and I fairly cheerfully send him off to the desert every 12-18 months. I just don't want to share him right now, while he is still here. I want the whole world to just stop, for two or three days, please. 

 I asked nicely.