2 weeks a summer … right

National Guard troops are supposed to serve one weekend a month and two weeks a summer. That sounds reasonable. Except this summer it’s three weeks and I never heard anything about a class that runs from the week of Thanksgiving until spring. HabMoo’s absences are becoming more routine than I’d like.

After the winter’s training, three weeks sounded like nothing. He went off with friends to a cabin for the weekend before he left and neither of us really thought much about it. We’ve commented during nightly phone calls about how we’re doing just fine. But now it’s day 14 and we’re missing each other. Two weeks is what we can accept. Additional days are too many.

At two weeks I’m beginning to establish a new routine. By the end of week three I’ll have parts of it down and when he comes home he’ll mess it up. That’s a pretty minor conflict, but it’s an element of stress and there are more. When he returns we’ll both assume the other knows thoughts we’ve had in the previous days because we would have shared them it we’d been together. The refrigerator and cabinets will be rather empty because I quickly get out of the habit of stocking food for him. He will need to catch up on sleep when he returns and I’ll be used to staying up until I can’t keep my eyes open. The cats have been allowed to stay out all night and will make us pay for HabMoo insisting that they come in.

There are lots of small issues like these that slightly stress the marriage. Add to that the mental preparations we’re both making for his upcoming deployment and we could have a real issue. Not an easily defined one, however. I fully suspect that we’ll love the first couple of days he’s home and then things will feel slightly off. It’s important not to take those feeling too seriously, but to acknowledge them, nevertheless. I guess it’s good that we have experience hearing the other say “you’re kind of bugging me right now” and knowing that it’s a temporary state.

We need to come up with a few more homecoming routines to make transitions more comfortable. It seems almost silly to think that three weeks ‘f separation during which time we communicate nightly by phone and are both in the same state should need a ritual, but I think it does. I’m sure we’ll go out for sushi. We had our first sushi together when he was at some southern base waiting to go to Iraq in 2004. So we do have that ritual, but I think we need another. We need a project to complete together. Maybe we’ll tackle the last of the house painting I began in 2001 or just start over at the beginning. Or maybe we’ll just go hang out at Best Buy and Half-Price Books.