Impending Doom

I am awaiting the return of my husband, who has spent the last 6 months in Kuwait. I am anxious for his return, but at the same time, I am dreading it. Why?

Probably because I can’t seem to make him understand that after having been married to him for 8 1/2 years, I KNOW that he has certain expectations about our lives upon his return, many of which are not based on logical expectations, nor are they rational. So given this knowledge base, and the fact that he is coming back expecting a GRAND homecoming, the date of which he is trying to keep secret, he can’t actually expect me to believe when he says that he is not expecting to come home and just lay about.

Is he kidding me? Every return from a deployment, no matter how long or short, he comes home after having been away for as little as 24 hours, he behaves like a dying man in a desert oasis. He behaves as he is literally starved for attention.

He cannot expect that our lives will come to a grinding halt just because he is coming home! That’s madness. I could see if I had spent the last six months doing nothing but laying about the house. Or if we literally did nothing and never left the house. But reality is I have been keeping us so busy so we didn’t have time to miss him. If I legit had no commitments, then yes, he could come home and expect my undivided attention.

As it is, he is coming home in the midst of a restructuring of my life, so I have taken on volunteer activities, sports, scholastic endeavors, and become more involved in my church. All of which he should have known as I’ve been keeping him up to date via email or when he was able to make calls home. None of these can actually be put on PAUSE indefinitely just because he expects me to.

I can’t seem to get it through his head that he isn’t going to have the “experience” that he expects. It is altogether possible that he might actually get a lot of downtime from work upon his return. But it is not reasonable for him to refuse to accept that he is returning to a house in full stride. It’s like I am telling him, but he’s not listening. He isn’t taking me seriously and he is setting himself up for failure.

A failure which then he will blame on me for having a life, for continuing to move life forward for me and the kids in his absence. He forgets, I was in the military too, so this is not new to me. I know what it is like to come back from a deployment and have to play catch up. I am dreading his return, and I dread his reaction.

I can only hope and pray that he will be ready to hit the ground running almost as soon as he steps off the plane, and be willing to roll with the punches. I can only wait and see…