Once Around Again: Wishful Thinking

Another episode of Once Around Again, and it has brought me back a post from 2009. I had hopes of what it would be like when my then husband came back from deployment. I realize now it was wishful thinking because it never turned out the way I had expected.

Once Around Again is a series named after an old inside joke between my brother and me, back before I knew what a glaring asshole he’d grow up to be. Like most inside jokes, it only made sense if you knew why it was funny at the time, but the phrase stuck. We used to say it whenever we were back at it again, whatever “it” happened to be: back on the road, hearing the same bullshit from the same person, backtracking down a street because our father refused to ask for directions. That’s the spirit behind this series: me revisiting posts I wrote a lifetime ago. I literally have sons older than some of these posts, lol.

Reading posts like these after the fact makes me realize how much I was fooling myself into believing that things were fine. I shouldn’t have been anxious or filled with dread about his return. I should have felt confident and excited. I shouldn’t have been waiting for the judgement of someone expecting perfection. But that realization is the result of distance from hindsight. At the time, I actually thought knowing that he would come home and immediately have expectations that I would have to excuse away because I knew he wouldn’t understand my reality was a normal occurrence.

I had no concept that living like this was the sign of being in an abusive relationship. I had no concept at the time that it was not going to get better, it was only going to get worse. If anything, it makes me wonder what more I would have written if I had started my blog when we first got married, instead of seven years into the marriage, and only after I was out of the military. Well, wishing never got me anywhere, and the reality is what it is.

Been A Long Time – originally posted April 29, 2009