I've been an Army wife for nearly a decade, but when I add up the days I've lived with my soldier, the days between the deployments and other military trips, the total is only about four years. Most of those days must be patched together into a crazy quilt of weeks and months, with off-day celebrations for the missed holidays and birthdays.
Mine, like most military marriages, bears little resemblance to the yellow-ribbons-apple-pies-and-passionate-kisses people like to imagine for us. It's comical, really, the things people assume. My husband and I are not flag-waving patriots, and there is nothing in either of our backgrounds to better qualify us to handle the missing years and awkward reunions. And, though we have developed some systems for dealing with the myriad issues, by no means do we “have this down by now,†as people are fond of projecting.
I'm not complaining. This is the life my husband and I chose, and neither of us regret our decisions to serve . We love each other with an intense yet nuanced love - the kind of connection achieved only after a couple has endured something awful together. In many ways, the difficulties caused by distance, separation and tragedy have made our lives richer, and we each walk tall in the knowledge of all that we have overcome. In fact, it is often when he is home, and not when he is gone, that we face our biggest challenges.
Reintegration is a military term that means “Hello, Stranger. Let's cohabit and raise these kids.†It's like those early months of a new marriage, that tedious time of relationship-defining, the he-never-picks-up-his-socks/she-spends-every-Saturday-watching-â€Real-Housewives-of-Dubuque†period. That awful phase of adjustment is every day in the life of many military couples. We rarely get past the negotiating point because we aren't together long enough to slip into routine.
Instead, each time we try to live together again, we are stared down by t he reality that, in each other's absence, we have each changed and our life together has changed. As my husband once explained it to me: “Imagine you spent a year daydreaming about taking a nap on your couch. You thought about it every day while you were deployed. And then you get home and the couch is gone. It's been replaced by two chairs. They're nice chairs, comfy chairs, but they're not your couch - and you really just want your couch back.â€
And that's just the furniture. Four-foot-tall children are now four and a half feet tall. Babies are toddlers. Teenagers are adults. Pets have died. Friends and family members have died. Life has moved on, and no one knows how to reconcile what “was†with what “is.â€
Here's the rub - after a decade of war there are guides, Web sites, pamphlets, briefings and books to help military families deal with deployments. There is more advice than anyone wants or needs on how to fill the long months of a deployment and how to tackle the problems created when one adult is gone and the other has to become two people. What we need is advice on how to make two people into a couple again.
Post-deployment reintegration barely merits a mention in most of these resources, and usually then only with a throwaway sentence that admonishes us to “give it time†and to “expect difficulty.†But how long, and how much difficulty? No one tells us that, and no one tells us what we can do to make it better.
The most constructive collection of reintegration ideas I've seen was penned by an author who admitted to me that she doesn't really know much about the military. Gretchen Rubin's new book, “Happier at Home,†picks up where her best seller “The Happiness Project†left off and features practical ideas to help families draw closer - something desperately needed in a military community where divorce is now as common as camouflage.
Ideas such as kissing every morning and every night, greeting every family member as they come home and bidding each goodbye when they leave and planning weekly one-on-one adventures - both for parents and for spouses without children - weren't conceived by Ms. Rubin to be a primer on military reintegration, but I've found them to be remarkably effective. The overarching point, I suppose, is simply to make an concerted effort to be kind, considerate and close.
The military is notoriously slow to change, and family efforts tend to be a low priority. It took many years of deployments before the resources to help families caught up to the needs. Now, with the wars winding down, it's time for reintegration efforts to become the major focus for military family support. Unfortunately, all of this is happening just as the Department of Defense is having to slash budgets for everything - leaving many military marriages likely to become just another casualty of war.
And so those of us fighting for our home fronts wi ll continue to fumble toward couplehood, tripping over the everyday issues that we know we ought to have mastered by now. We are stunted in marriage, slowed in our relationship growth because of all the time we've spent growing apart. Often as not, instead of our wedding bands' symbolizing unity, they are like Venn diagrams, or worse, concentric circles as impenetrable as force fields. For a decade, we've done this apart-together-apart dance, a constant pushing and pulling, clinging to each other and then shoving the other away - and we don't know what to do now that the music has changed.
Rebekah Sanderlin writes a blog called Operation Marriage and is on the National Advisory Board for Blue Star Families. She lives with her husband and three children in Niceville, Fla.
