The Longest 31 Days of My Life

Trust me when I say I went back and forth (and back and forth) on posting this. I'm hesitant and, honestly, feel ill when I think about putting so much of myself out there. (seriously, I'm starting to sweat.) 

However, it just is what it is and, if you're going to read this blog and follow along with my life, I do think it's important that you all know where I'm coming from. This army life has shaped the choices we make and the way we live, so this is just the latest installment of that. 

This blog is full of countless other examples over the last 7 years. 

The trip Scott just came back from was only 31 days but it was definitely classified as a deployment. It wasn't temporary duty (TDY), it wasn't training...it was actually called a deployment. While it was *only* a month, it was, I'm pretty sure, the longest month of my life.

We found out in April that this would be happening. We didn't know if it would be 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, or more. This has never happened before and there was no set timeline. We started prepping for as if he'd be gone all summer (again). There were many tears on my part. The worst part was that he'd just gotten home from Afghanistan a few months before.

There were a lot of moving pieces on my end of this deployment. To make a really long story short, we had decided back in December that we were going to do a cycle of IVF in the spring. Since spring had unexpectedly brought a deployment, and we didn't know if he would be gone for weeks or for months, we immediately got on the doctor's schedule and paid for it and made that May's priority.  Scott left mid-May, which meant I got to take on everything that goes with managing the house, the dogs, my job, and IVF all by myself. This was not for the faint of heart. I gave myself more injections than I could count, drove to more appointments than I care to remember, and I missed an entire week of school. (Okay, I did count: it was more than 40 injections.)

Just as I had started to feel normal again (which takes weeks), I found out that the IVF didn't work.

Then, I was left to shoulder the emotional and mental burden of that by myself.

I won't even pretend to play this off or act like it was no big deal. In fact, I'm aware that people go through much worse and, looking at it through my military wife lens, it was just another roadblock.

When I look at it through lens of the regular person that I am, it was a really big deal. It was almost too much to handle because I couldn't even talk to Scott about it. We only talked twice in 31 days. We were able to text, only because he has a government phone for work. We weren't able to make any decisions or decide what to do next. And I told myself nothing was going to change in a couple of weeks and attempting to have long drawn-out texting conversations would just stress us both out. I just told the doctor that I would call for a follow-up appointment when Scott got back. I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing at this point, apparently. This is just the latest lesson in how to be a military wife, I guess.

We have plans to not be active duty for the next few years. There's a way to earn active duty time while doing other things and that's what Scott will be doing. So hopefully this most recent stint will be the last in that long list of what he has had to do in Colorado.

So anyway. That's the story of the longest month of my life. I had thought that the year I was alone in Alaska had taught me more than I would ever need to know, but these 31 days did ten times that. For that, I'm grateful, even if that seems to make absolutely no sense sometimes.