Deployment Lessons Learned So Far

So in the very small amount of time that my husband has been away on the big grey ship, I have already learned a few things.

What works for some wives, may not work for others.
There are many women that choose to keep everything that is happening at home to themselves, so not to burden their husbands with more stress than they are already experiencing on deployment. While I WHOLE-HEARTEDLY respect how every wife (minus the cheaters) deals with the stress of handling all the affairs, I've found that this isn't for me. No, I will not tell him every time the dogs make me upset, every time I have a disagreement with a friend, if I have a tummy ache or if I had to call and argue with the cable or phone company. But not disclosing any of the stressful situations I made deal with just isn't realistic for me. And I've learned that that's okay. Some days it may be one thing after another after another. And some days, while you're busy kicking-deployment's ass, it may get in a good punch and land you on your ass for a second. I tried to be strong for my husband, so much that I pretended things on the homefront were nearly smoother than they were when he was here. There wasn't a problem in the world. And that ended up hurting me in the end, and it made me end up being the bad guy, because I was strong and there was nothign wrong, but I was taking something out on him, and that hurt us as a couple. I have also learned, however, that trying to get away with keeping all my stressors from my husband is impossible. He knows. Just when I started to feel the brunt of everything at once, he called. And with a lump in my throat I said "Hello", and without skipping a beat he said "It's not what you expected is it? It's harder than you were prepared for, isn't it?". And it made everything better. :]

Even if you think that everything is squared away before he leaves, power of attourney is vital
All bills not under both of our names were paid off and squared away before my hubbers took off. And then some debt that some company thinks he owes...from 2007....showed up in the mail. On our anniversary. Thankfully we had a few copies of power of attourney drawn up, because it's obvious now that there's not way for hubbers to deal with this on his own, or at all.

Keeping busy is very important, but keeping TOO busy is not a good thing
Being my first deployment, it was already a transition to go from sharing many responsibilities with my husband to having them all on my plate alone. I wanted to keep busy while hubby was gone, but I decided to hold off on taking on too many activities before he left. Thank god. Before he left, work school and housework didn't see like much. Now, suddenly, I'm realizing that he must have helped me more than I ever noticed, because even those things sometime overwhelm me. I did try to take on some other crafty projects and what not, but it sent me into a whirlwind of pressure, deadlines, and just plain stress.


Doing things like this may not make him too happy, they make me feel a lot better about things!::

Getting it together

Well I'm still less than a week into this deployment, and while I wouldn't say it's kicking my ass in any way, I'm not sure I'm kicking its', either. Of course sending my husband away for a very lengthy time (could be longer, but that doesn't make 7 months insignificant) comes with a feeling that no one could have ever described. I held strong the first day, and even most of the second. About halfway through, little stuff started happening. It's so silly. But our neighbors have been on vacation for weeks, and they finally came home. Our little puppy Bailey finally got brave enough to go all the way up the stairs to our apartment. The people with an adjacent balcony to ours finally cleaned all the ucky trash out of their balcony. It's little stuff that I would turn around and tell Mike, or add it to my mental list to tell him when he got home from work. Sure, I could email him, but I dont' feel right emailing him ten million insignificant things a day that make me miss him. How would that help?

So so far this week I've been working on getting things together. Doing the last of his leftover laundry, cleaning the house, I even rearranged the bedroom. I've started going to the gym and I'm working on my final projects for school. I'm keeping busy but it still seems like I can't get it together. I feel like I don't have much control over anything.

So since there are so many milspouses out there, I'm asking- when your loved one deployed, what did you do to get it together?