Modern love: my husband continues to abandon me

A month after Andrew proposed, he and I went to couples therapy, where, in our first session, he told me:

“If I have to choose between you and the Army, I choose the Army.”

His words left me breathless.

Five years earlier, on our first date, he had said (after drinking too much):

“I’m going to marry you.”

“You’re crazy,” I replied.

It appears it wasn’t.

But when he proposed to me, he had been struggling for two years with his desire to join the Army and my desire that he not.

I was 27 years old.

He was 28 years old.

He knew his desire was so strong that some would say it was a calling.

But it wasn’t until he made his emphatic statement in the therapist’s office that I understood greatness of his conviction.

I had been raised as a pacifist.

I had expressed myself in against the war in Iraq and I opposed our participation in the war in Afghanistan in the same way as much of my generation did, which is to say vaguely and comfortably.

She didn’t want the man she loved to fight in Afghanistan or any war.

I didn’t want to leave New York to go wherever the Army decided to send me, or give up the editing job I’d worked so hard for, or leave my friends.

Well, we have just celebrated twelve years of marriage and we have two children, a 5 year old boy and a 7 year old girl.

So yes, I finally gave in.

Over the course of our marriage, Andrew has deployed seven times and attended longer training sessions than I can count.

We moved from New York to Georgia and then to Washington state.

He missed birthdays, Christmas, anniversaries, emergency room visits and four months of Isolation for covid with two children under 4 years old.

Every few months my husband flies to work, usually at night.

He’s used to these jumps, but he says there’s something wrong about getting off a plane hurtling through the dark.

I know what you mean.

That’s how I feel every time I say hello to him.

For a long time I kicked and screamed, unable to master that paradoxical attitude of the most experienced Army couples I met: acquiescent but fiercely independent, community creators, tenacious.

Whatever happens, they handle it.

While I haven’t always accepted my role as an Army wife, I have accepted Andrew’s.

Above all he is a soldier.

At times, this has been a painful truth that I have had to live with and accept, but, like any certainty, it is comforting in its clarity, a beacon in this stormy life.

For him, the call to battle is, if not stronger than the push home, then at least equal to it.

It is an inviolable truth.

Or at least that’s what I thought.

What no one tells you about marriage is that its truths are elusive.

When the war ended Afghanistan As we transitioned into a more routine family life, I had missed Andrew for so long that what I missed had begun to fade.

I realized that I had felt abandoned for years, perhaps ever since he had made that harsh statement in the therapist’s office.

And she missed it so much at home that she wasn’t sure where she belonged.

But I wanted him to find it.

Luckily, he found it.

He was hungry to spend time with me and the kids, hungry for the certainty and comfort of home life, cooking elaborate meals for us, taking the kids on Saturday adventures, reading all the school emails before I even had the chance .

He had always loved us fiercely and been an excellent father, but now his center of gravity was within our home, and when he was gone, the invisible threads that bound us as a family seemed woven together in a new way. .

Sometimes, during his many absences, I had the feeling that we were experiencing a simulacrum of marriage, changing the ocean with its faint sound through the spiral of a conch shell.

But now, finally, we had the truth.

We had the ocean.

Two years passed without a deployment.

Then one evening, Andrew and I went out for a steak dinner, a rare occasion.

We were drinking cocktails and laughing our heads off when Andrew’s phone rang.

I heard his voice change and I knew it.

When he hung up, I waited for the slight but noticeable change in his body language, the tension in his jaw, the new distance in his normally sweet and attentive gaze.

My husband is an expert at compartmentalization, able to go from going out to dinner to packing for a mission with astonishing speed, leaving, somehow, before we’ve even had a chance to say goodbye.

But this time he surprised me: when he placed his hand on mine on the white tablecloth, I could hear a attraction towards home which was greater than his attraction to leave.

And perhaps precisely because every action has an equal and opposite reaction, I didn’t curse the Army or let my mood get worse.

When he told me that he would soon be traveling to an unknown location for an undetermined amount of time and that he didn’t know when he might be able to call or text me, tears welled up in my eyes and then quickly disappeared.

That’s where my kicking and screaming ended.

It wasn’t exactly a reversal of roles, but it was a shift in that inviolable truth.

Maybe I had finally become a experienced wife from the Army, just as he had become a family man.

A week after Andrew left, our 5-year-old son told me he thought Dad was dead.

My daughter turned 7 and the night of her birthday party she cried herself to sleep.

“Can we call dad, please?” she begged me.

“I would if I could,” I told him.

But I still didn’t kick or scream.

During therapy I cried once a week, but the rest of the time I was worried about my children.

When we finally heard something from Andrew, I heard it immediately in his voice, a painful tug.

He wanted to be with us so much, much more than he wanted to be there.

As if it were a miracle, he came home earlier than expected, and when he did, he gave me a notebook with the letters he had written to us when we couldn’t talk.

It was such a joy to have at home that it took me a week to watch it.

When I finally read the letters, I cried like I hadn’t since his first deployments.

Not being able to call us had tortured him, filled him with guilt, anguish and anger.

For years I have struggled to find a way to bridge the gap in our experiences.

I imagine this struggle is at the heart of many couples’ challenges, because marriage is the union of two different lives:

You see me? Can you hear me? Can you feel what I feel?

In the pages of the diary I recognized what I had felt for a long time, what my daughter was beginning to express: a profound helplessness.

The echo of kicks and screams that no one can hear.

The Army tells you what to do and you do it.

Realizing that I had been alone with that pain made my whole body ache.

It also hurt to realize how alone I had been with my parents.

The fact is that it wasn’t just the sides that pushed us apart.

The roles I had assigned to us at the beginning had had a sort of hypnotic power over us, they had prevented us from seeing ourselves fully.

Andrew is a soldier, but he has always been a family man.

And I may not have wanted him to join the Army, but I’m proud of what he accomplished, I supported his dream, and as it happens, I’m pretty tough.

Sometimes I think we cling to our assumed roles to endure the uncertainty that swirled in our heads: the successive deployments and the dangers of combat, but also the wonderfully absurd act of building a family, this small, reliable feat of love and comfort. that could be taken away from us at any moment.

“I feel like I woke up from a dream,” Andrew told me recently.

I feel the same.

We lost touch as any married couple does and now, twelve years later, it seems we are waking up again.

After all, if we choose roles in our marriage, we have the power to change or abandon them.

We have had many homecomings over the years, but this was by far the sweetest.

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