I've decided the best part about a deployment is the way you rearrange your priorities. My husband is the only person who knows my cell phone number, so when it rang Friday at work, I grabbed it and ran out of the office. Work wasn't important, being polite wasn't important, all that mattered was contact with a loved one. It's funny because my husband used to call me at work all the time before he left, usually to arrange a time to pick me up at the end of the day. I often hurried him off the phone or hung up with him when a student came in the door. But now, the student can wait.

And the thing is that you never know when you'll have your last phone call. Tragedies occur every day, and my husband had just as much chance of dying in garrison as he does in Iraq. But I cherish him all the more now that he's gone. I write him long letters every day, explaining every detail of Reservists who bug me or a funny incident in class. When mortality is staring you in the face, you cherish what you've got. I encourage all of you to cherish your relationships as well, especially the ones who aren't deployed. They're the ones we tend to put on the backburner.

I also was thinking yesterday about how lucky I am that my husband is merely deployed. Last night I watched the movie Amistad and then read more Gulag Archipelago before bed; oh how much worse life could be. If you choose to look at life through the right lens, then deployment seems like a trifle. If fate had treated me differently, my husband could've been sold into slavery and taken from me for forever. Or he could've been put in a Stalinist prison for ten years simply for "failing to turn in a radio receiver" to the government. There are much worse things I could be facing right now, and the thought of that gives me strength to endure the simple one-year deployment we now face.

Posted by: Sarah at 04:50 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 352 words, total size 2 kb.