Wow, where has the time gone? Already we are in the month of February! This is the month of love for many – where we celebrate Valentine’s Day and the joy that special someone brings to our lives.

For those of us with husbands in the military – active, reserve or National Guard – this month can bring a mix of emotions, especially if you’re in the middle of a deployment. This time last year that’s where I was. My husband was in California in training, just a couple of weeks away from deploying to Iraq, and the month of love for me was less of hearts and roses and more of tears and gritting my teeth to get through. Sound familiar for anyone?

Marriage can be stressful enough but when you throw the word military into it, the stress can quadruple! It can be difficult sometimes not to wish away the reality – or worse, blame our husbands.

I had coffee with an Air Force wife the other day and she asked me how to keep from resenting her husband for being gone so much.

Could I resent my husband?

“I love my husband, I know what he does is important and yet, it’s still hard being here by myself, raising the kids, keeping the house and everything else going while he’s away,” she said.

So, how do you keep from love turning into resentment, or even bitterness?

I think first you have to look at the situation objectively. That’s right – we have to remove all the emotion, the anger, the frustration, and the sadness away from the situation. (We’ll deal with all of that in just a moment.)

I’m reminded of one of my crazy roomates in college (I had four, and yes, two of them were crazy – one, maybe certifiable but that’s another post). Kari was the equivalent of a firecracker – short in stature but made up for it with her dramatic outbursts of anger which usually tended to land on her poor boyfriend Brian. I will never forget when her birthday rolled around.

“WHAT? WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE CAN’T GO OUT FOR MY BIRTHDAY TOMORROW NIGHT?”

Her shrill high pitch scream was coming through the door of her room and the suitemates and I, sitting in our little living room, assumed she was talking to Brian. Uh oh.

A few minutes later, her door flew open.

“Brian, my dear sweet loving boyfriend, says he can’t take me out for my birthday tomorrow night!” Kari, the Crazy Roomate, announced to no one in particular, her little 4’9″ body standing completely rigid.

We were shocked. We were perplexed. Why would Brian miss the chance to be with his little woman on such a special occasion? Why would he dare to try?

“HE has a BASEBALL game tomorrow night. HE actually had the nerve to suggest that we go out either before for lunch or this weekend.” Kari said, hand on her hip and tapping her foot. She would have totally resembled Grumpy Smurf, if she’d been blue.

Now we were confused.

“Uh, Kari, he can’t help it if he has a baseball game,” said Kathy, the Pretty Roomate, who was trying to calm the Crazy Roomate and smooth away the serious furrows in her already tiny brow. I wondered how brain aneurysms form.

“OH YES, OH YES he can!” Kari declared.

We all leaned in, expecting some huge bombshell of how Boyfriend Brian volunteered for this game, that maybe he didn’t have to go but he just wanted to…

“He’s the one who joined the college baseball team. Of course it’s his fault.”

Huh?

Married to the military

Now, as insane as Crazy Keri sounded for blaming her boyfriend (who believe it or not actually became her husband later I think) for deliberately missing her birthday because he joined the baseball team, how many of us do the same towards our husbands for joining the military?

Of course, I know a baseball game and a year long deployment are not the same things by any stretch of the imagination. There are so many military wives who have seen their husbands leave multiple times and watch their children grow up without their daddies around to see it.

But we can’t let resentment and bitterness build up. We can’t let our frustrations, and our anger and our sadness morph into an emotional weapon that’s aimed right at our husbands. Instead, we have to find a way to get those emotions out without taking our husbands heads off in the process.

The biggest way to avoid doing this is to communicate better. Talk about things as you can when you can and don’t push stuff so far down that when you do talk about it, you end up exploding like a volcano and your poor husband wonders where all of this is coming from.

Some women still think that when our husbands are away, we have to keep everything bad or hard to ourselves, giving them only the bright and happy side of life. But that’s not fair to your husband or to you because while your husband definitely needs to be able to focus on his mission, he also can’t just forget about his family, or feel like his family has forgotten about him.

At the same time, it’s also not fair to your husband to bring him down every time he talks to you with tales of how lonely you are and how miserable you are and how you just don’t think you can take another day of this. It may be exactly how you feel, but you can get that idea across without pounding it into him over and over.

This is where reinforcements come in. This is where you need to find other military wives to talk to. To vent and be angry and cry and feel briefly insane for just a moment… so when you do talk to your husband, you can tell him how things are going minus the heaving sobs.

One last thought to keep in mind. Though they don’t show it the same way we do, our husbands miss us just as much as we miss them, just in different ways. Just because they don’t or can’t call every day, doesn’t mean they’re not thinking about us. Just because an email is short and to the point, minus all of the lovey dovey words they used to write when we were dating, doesn’t mean that they don’t still feel that.

When we are in the throes of deployment, we cannot focus on love as an emotion so much but as a verb. And we love them anyway. Despite the deployment. Despite the upsets and the hiccups. We love them anyway.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this subject and I’d also like to invite our other blogger wives to join in the conversation and add your own post to the subject of love.

How do you love your husband when he’s at home? When he’s away? How do you keep resentment from building? Share your thoughts so that other ladies can be encouraged!

Have a good Monday!

Popularity: 1% [?]