Evidence of Life

Five Minute Friday is here again already!!!  Sometimes it is my favorite thing all week.  This week’s word feels positively providential.

I cried a lot today.  It’s been that kind of week.

As I sat across from my pastor, earlier this week, spilling out all the things that had been held in for too long with no one to sit with me and catalog the damage, he told me some things that I needed to hear even though I didn’t really want to hear them.

He said my struggles were gospel struggles.

And he said my grief was real.

And he said my pain was real.

And he said they were good things and I was supposed to be feeling them.

I knew what he meant, but he worried that I would think that he was telling me it was good to be in pain.  I nodded that I understood that it was more about being in the process and being human and owning that humanity.

I clearly realized as I sat there that one of the things that I am feeling repeatedly right now looks something like, “I am in pain.  I am really in pain.  I don’t want to be in pain anymore.  Make it stop.”

I am impatient with my pain and with the feeling of these hard things.

Right now, all is tender….  I am alive to the ache and the pain of missing my husband.  I am alive to the grief and the deep soul cuts that came as a result of losing our church.  I am alive to the ache of worry and anxiety that come when tests are ordered and results are slow in coming.

I finally heard back on the MRI that I was awaiting news about.  After a day of being proactive and plucky, I learned that there was ‘no clinical significance’ for the abnormalities that were found.  This is good news.  A repeat MRI is indicated in a year and we’ll see if anything else comes out of that.

It’s good news, but I hung up the phone and cried for hours, and I do mean hours  For the tenderness, and the hurt of walking this without my love…  For the anxiety that has been held tight in my neck and my shoulders and behind my eyes for weeks now that seems now to have been in vain.

I am tender….  and I find that those things which indicate my aliveness…  Those moments of “I am in pain.  I am really in pain.  I don’t like it.  I want this to stop now,” need released often these days.

They spill over and I stand in it and I try to remember…

This tenderness, this teariness, this pain…   is evidence that I am alive.

Layers

So while I was driving today, I was thinking about layers.

It was a doozy of a morning around here.  My girls have decided to formally boycott getting up and getting dressed for school.  Every morning I wake them up a little before 7:30 a.m.  At 8 a.m. every morning (after a few prods and pushes), I let them know that they are running out of time.  At 8:20 every morning I start to panic and drill sergeant Mama shows up.  I yell and veins bulge and somehow… things start to move, but slowly…  at 8:40 every moment the panic mode goes into hyper-drive because we are now on the cusp of officially being late.  At 8:51 every  morning I look at the clock on the van and wonder how in the heck 11 full minutes have passed since the last time I looked at it because it shouldn’t take that long for two girls to finish up the last minute tasks of putting coats on and getting strapped in, and I hastily drive Carolyn to the student drop off spot because she doesn’t have time to walk to the playground from the school entrance connected to base housing.  At 8:51:30, I berate the children for us doing this Every. Single. Day.  At 8:52 I feel profoundly guilty especially at the gnawing feeling in my stomach which suggests that I have just set my daughters up to have the worst days of their lives at school by being Drill Sergeant Mama for a fully 32 minutes and I soften my tone and remind them that I love them and that we’re going to be ok and we all can have a good day and that I’m sorry that sometimes I use a mean voice.  At 8:53, Carolyn arrives on the cusp of lateness which Carolyn tells me means that the bell hasn’t rung yet but all the kids are already on the rug.  At 9:03 Abigail and I arrive at her preschool, late for that one too, I hug her, I kiss her, and I marvel at all the together mothers who make my puddling mess of frazzled look so darned bad each and every morning and I try not to cry on my steering wheel again.

So yes.  I had that kind of morning this morning.

And then immediately after that morning, I hastily drove to the parking lot of my church where the pastor of our new church was waiting to meet with me because I had gotten to that point where letting things rattle around and bounce off of my insides over and over and over again ricocheting here and there around my head was simply too much to do.  And here…  before THAT meeting of vulnerable goo I had had a morning that nearly broke me in two.

I talked in this meeting and I poured out the grief that I still feel in such intensity over the loss of our friends and our family and our involvement  as a result of the loss of our church.  I poured out the stress and the weariness and fatigue I am feeling in the midst of this deployment and the anxiety and unease and overwhelmedness I still feel when I am processing this year post-tumor and the ways that medical surveillance will always be a part of my life, and the added anxiety and unease and overwhelmedness I’ve been feeling as a result of this “bonus” MRI and the somewhat unclear findings of it and the….  Waiting, waiting, waiting…  (We’re going on a fully 2 and a half weeks now) for my doctor to read the report and make a recommendation about an action plan.

As I was driving today I was thinking about layers…  I was thinking about the layers that I live and struggle in:  The…  Tired Mommy trying to get her kids off to school, trying to make sure I’m not too hard/too soft, trying to balance the attention that they need and the downtime I crave, trying to be a good Mom and the Failure feelings that creep in on all of us who are part of this profession of Mommyhood.

And I was thinking about the layer of being a woman whose husband is on deployment.  The tiredness of that, the sheer attrition of it…  The stress and the anxiety and the deep in the bones ache of longing for my love.

And the layer of medical anxiety past and present.

And the layer of loss of church and very, very real grief that doesn’t make sense to anyone, but is really, really real and must be felt and worked through.

There are these layers that I exist in and struggle in, in various degrees and at different times every. single. day.

I’m sure you have them too…  The every day life struggles and the normal struggles of relationships and the struggles of your deepest heartaches and fears and anxieties.

We balance them and juggle them and navigate them all every single day.

My layers were validated today and I needed that.  It was good.  It was necessary.  I was grateful.

But as I thought about my layers, I didn’t feel sorry for myself.  Instead I felt grateful.

In all of those layers…  those layers that when spoken back to me and laid out for me to see by someone else… With that outside perspective I can see their potential to be soul-crushing and I can understand why I was full to the brim of coping on my own and needed to find a safe place to lean it all on today.

But in all of those layers, I am still somehow sustained.  I am borne up under them.  It’s not perfect and it’s not clean and it’s not always pretty.  Often it is messy, frayed, shocking.

But I am borne up.  I am shored up.  And I am held as they pelt and lash like the winds and rains that whipped up around us during that drive of frazzlement that got the kids settled at school today.

In those layers I see my weakness.  I see my strength.  I see His light shining through the cracked-pot, crack-pot chinks in my armor.

And deep within me, somehow, I have to catch my breath for the beauty.

Say Hi on Facebook!

Facebook

You can find the Blogeroo on Facebook now.   I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing over there, but I’m trying to be trendy and hip.  ;)  Ok.  You know better, I don’t do trendy and hip, but I am on Facebook!

Stumbling Barefoot on Facebook

In Which I Reveal My not-so-guilty T.V. Pleasures and the Way God Meets Me In Them

It’s Five Minute Friday!!!  I’m always so grateful to Lisa Jo for these days of writing just for the thrill of words and language and seeing where they’ll take me.

Full confession:  My kids kept interrupting me so I lost track of time and I know I wrote longer than five minutes, but Five Minute Friday again got my creative juices starting to flow!  Also, I really had no intention of admitting to you all that I am a TV on DVD junkie and that I love watching the romance of on-screen couples like Booth and Brennan on Bones unfold, but hey…  What can I say?  This is the real me.  ;)  

One of my go-to coping mechanisms is getting lost in someone else’s story.  I have a T.V. series that corresponds with most of the major struggles of my life since entering adulthood.  Felicity, Grey’s Anatomy, Bones, West Wing, Murphy Brown…  All of them have given me a story to slip into with vivid colors and the struggles of someone else to care about when the stakes weren’t too high.  Books have been the same kind of respite for me.  I slip into old favorites like my Madeleine L’Engle collection or the world of Anne of Green Gables and pull them around me like a comfy bath robe.  The language and the hope and the idealism help me to cocoon and re-center myself.

Sometimes I’m surprised at how God finds me there, even as I’m escaping the “real world.”  I woke up yesterday still feeling a little glum…  dreading another day of being snowed in, missing husband, and with a wicked, awful toothache.  Since I woke up earlier than I expected and knew I didn’t have to get the kids ready for school I put Bones on to zone out to.  Now I love me some Bones and this happened to be one of those mushy-gushy ones where Brennan’s intellectualism is cracking a little bit and she needs a safe place to fall and her partner, Booth, is always that.

Those scenes can be dangerous when Hubby is away because they make me miss him so much…  He is MY safe place to fall and he’s the one person who sees all of the nitty-gritty Valness in all it’s glory.  In the last few years of things that felt so much bigger than me, I put on a brave face with everyone but him.

The vividness of my imagination gave me that little comparison and then I went downstairs to start the day and do my devotions.  And what did I find?  A passage and a reflection about how God rescues us.  And it occurred to me right there, that this little ‘escape from reality’ had given me the chance to snuggle up close to the heart of God.  I miss that safe place to fall that I find in my husband and that I’m reminded of when watching my favorite on-screen romances unfold, but here God used this escape and the tool of my imagination to show me that HE is filling in those gaps.  That HE is always my first and best soft place to fall.  That I can be a spoiled brat birthday girl with Him, and the brute beast that the Psalmist calls out.  I can crumble a little bit and take off my public brave face.  My husband is the Booth to my Brennan, but God was that first.

He finds me in the funniest places sometimes.  I love that.

Spoiled Little Birthday Girl

Tomorrow is my birthday.

The standard milspouse line for a birthday when one’s spouse is away is, “As Military Spouses we know that a day is just  a day and that we can celebrate special days at our own time in our own way.”

But, as we’ve already established I’m just not doing so well with saying the lines on my milspouse script this time around.

Tomorrow is my birthday and my husband says that since it’s my party, I can cry if I want to.

My kids…  My amazing, amazing kids have been cooking things up for the last few days. I will get sweet, sweet little cards tomorrow that they have poured their hearts into.  And it will melt my heart and it will make tomorrow precious in spite of it all.  How do I dare complain in the face of such sweetness?

But this Mama is tired…  Just so tired.  Of doing it all, of being the Mom and the Dad.  Of trying to find some time, any time, to get the housework done, but still always being behind.  Of getting the house in order only to find it falling down around my ears a few minutes later.  Of parenting on fumes and trying so hard not to yell but finding myself hoarse again.  Of waiting for test results and answers.  Of planning for contingencies and unforeseen scenarios.  Of telling the kids for the 2000th time at 11 p.m. at night that they must, they must, THEY MUST GO TO SLEEP RIGHT NOW.

This Mama is tired.

My birthday is tomorrow and I never grew up all the way.  I’m just an overgrown five year old really.  I want the party and the balloons.  I want to be celebrated.  And there is a little spoiled brat inside of me warring and screaming that tomorrow just won’t be as special as I want it to be.  As it should be.  I turn 31 tomorrow and I want to feel good about it, but what I really feel is just…

Incomplete.

That’s what it comes down to.

What I really want tomorrow is him.  I want him next to me, doing this with me.  I want him to sing off key with the girls and to bake me a cake and decorate it better than I ever could. I want help wiping down the table and sweeping up the kitchen and the one person in the world who tells me that I am cherished and makes me believe it to be here to do just that tomorrow.

That’s what I want for my birthday, and I know I can’t have it.

I have to park my brain in better places than this, and I know it.

I’m trying to call my eyes and my heart to the abundance of love that God is showering upon me and the ways that he woos and celebrates me every day.  Through my kids and their pint-sized bodies and grandiose birthday overtures…  Through reminders that have been flashing over and over again of “My” verse.  Through him calling my mind back to the points in time when I have felt the most cherished by Him.

And it is in those moments that I will fight to stay and that I will try to cling to tomorrow.

I’d be lying though if I told you it wasn’t going to be a battle to keep my mind there.

This mama is tired and this road is wearying and long and I’m 31 tomorrow and baking my own cake.

His mercies are new every morning and the dawn of my 31st year will surely be no different, if I can keep my eyes open and my brain parked in his pastures of plenty.

P.S.  I have great hopes that eventually this blog will again become something other than a deployment whine fest.  Really.

Of Squeaks and Roars

Five Minute Friday!!  

The Gypsy Mama wants me to write about the word “Roar” today.  Roar?  Really?

This week I have had moments where I wanted to stand out on my porch and yell, “I AM NAVY WIFE HERE ME ROAR!!!”  I have had moments when I have (sadly) roared at one of my kids…  And I have had moments when my roariness sounded a lot more like the teeny tiny Simba squeak at the beginning of The Lion King (not that we’ve watched that movie 67 times lately or anything).

Today I’m feeling more Simba-squeaky than roary.  I have an MRI for a new issue or at least a new symptom.  I’m told, “It’s probably nothing, Mrs. R.  It’s probably completely benign.”  And I keep repeating those words in my head.

It’s just that you know that first funeral you go to after you’ve lost someone near and dear to you and it’s still kind of all up at the surface and even though this loss hits you differently some of the hurt just comes rushing on in again.  This feels kind of like that.  They tell me it’s ‘probably nothing’ and it probably is, but I have all this Tomas stuff bubbling up to the surface.

And husband isn’t here.  Which adds to it all to be honest.  I roar with more confidence in these situations when he’s by my side and we can go out to dinner afterwards and I can debrief about it all with him.  He’s got the patience of a saint and listens to each blow by blow description of the IV, and the cool injection of the contrast and the knocking and beeping of the machine and the right on top of your nose closeness of the mask on my face.

I feel squeaky today and a little bit daunted.  But sometimes walking through the squeaky parts are what help you get to the other side.  Looking back on the squeaks can fuel the strength that you need to roar the next time.  And I’m sure even in this relatively minor little squeak, that will be the case today.

Unfold

I’m not sure which year it started, but I don’t seem to look at the New Year like everyone else.  I love how hope-filled and reflective folks get.  I even love the hope that is contained in resolutions–Maybe every year before they’d all flopped, but there’s something there that still makes people hope that THIS will be the year that they jog every day, or lose 50 pounds or not yell at their kids as much.

As for me, if I think too long about the year ahead of me, my head goes a little wonky these days.  I guess it’s because in the past I’ve had this expectation that a ‘good’ year would look level and settled and there wouldn’t be too many deviations from the expected path.

And well…  most of the years in the last decade have had some pretty major deviations from the expected path.  I’ve still found goodness in each and every one of them, but there’ve just been these surprises that jumped out at us like a gorilla out of your bedroom closet that made the years in all their goodness not look at all like I expected.

Sometimes I get a little anxious about such things…  Especially when everyone is talking about what the next few months or the next year might or might not bring.  As such, I confess, at New Year’s when everyone else is hope-filled and dreaming of better things to come a part of me deep in the pit of my stomach is thinking, “12 months is quite a bit of time…  what curve balls are we going to face as we march through them?  What phone calls will come that change everything?  What news will we be given?”

Truly curve-balls of one sort or another are something that we can all expect each and every year.

That pit of my stomach place feels a little anxious and panicky looking ahead.  Will there be words like ‘tumors’ or ‘deployment’ or ‘illness’ or ‘loss?’  Or will there be words that I haven’t even thought to anticipate?

I just don’t know.

I’m not sure when the concept of having a word for the new year crept into my head.  It might have been when reading Ann Voskamp’s 1000 gifts in the passages where she talked about focusing on a certain word for a year.  It doesn’t really matter how the idea took root though.  It just did.

I didn’t really mean to think up a word or a verse for this year, but they kind of fell on me this week with that kind of holy spirit nudge-wink thing that happens that made me think I should pay attention.  And so I am.

The thing is…  Just like those curve  balls, neither the word or the verse look anything like I expected they would if I ever took up such a practice as this.  Ann Voskamp’s words are always so beautiful and ethereal sounding, “Eucharisteo.”  ”Communion.”  I mean…  If I’m going to do this, I’m a girl who loves words…  I want one that brings my mind right to the clouds.

Or at least one that takes some effort.  Maybe, I thought to myself, it should be something like “Trust” or “Hope” or “Faith.”  ”Obey,” sounds right to me too.  If I’m going to focus on something for a whole year, it seems there should be some muscle of the spiritual or physical variety involved.

Neither the word or the verse that came to mind are so muscle-y, it turns out.

The word that keeps whispering at me as I stare down this New Year with my hopes and my anxieties and my fear of expectation is, “Unfold.”

Unfold?  Unfold?  Um…  like what Lainey does to the clothes when she sees the laundry basket in the middle of the floor?  That doesn’t sound holy or spiritual or muscle-y.  It sounds…  like MY effort isn’t really needed.  Unfold?

But I know that’s the word.  We have the rest of this deployment to navigate through a couple of Tomas-y loose ends and check-ups to attend to.  We have 12 months of possibility for the year to blow my mind in wonderfulness and curve-balls.

Unfold…  I feel like I’m being asked just to let it unfold.  To see what transpires and to trust that there is work going on beneath the surface of it all.

On top of that,  I feel like something is whispering to my soul that there are parts of me that are wound tight…  Like a crumpled up piece of paper or…  a school form that has gotten folded and folded and folded so many times that it looks a little ragged around the edges and it’s hard to read.  There are things within me that need to unfold.  And it’s NOT to be about my effort.  It’s not something to resolve to be or to do.  Instead it’s something to rest in and watch.  It’s a ride to simply sit down on and experience.

Unfold.

With the word came a verse.  It’s the kind of verse that tweaks my head a little bit even because it starts right in the middle of a sentence which makes me get all jittery about context and seeing the big picture but just the same THIS is the verse that keeps lapping in and out of my head.

“…being confident in this that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”  Philippians 1:6

Wait so again…  this isn’t something that I’m muscling through and DOING.   It’s something happening within me that God is doing continuously?

Then I hear, “Watch it unfold.”

I have goals for the year.  I do.  I have a list of them.  I have goals and wishes and hopes.  And as I mentioned a few anxieties.  And I feel like I’m being ushered out of the way on every single one.  Which isn’t to say that I’m not still being asked to show up with them.  I am.  I need to show up.  It’s just that I think I’m being asked to remember that I’m not the one at the helm on any one of them.  The good works being wrought in me and in my life are being teased out and every so slowly completed by the Holy Spirit at work within me.  So I have to show up…  I do.  But then I get out of the way.

It takes a tremendous amount of pressure off actually.

Regardless of how I feel this year I’m being called to trust that He is working continuously in me.

So I take on this new ‘word for the year’ challenge that I never really expected I’d do.

I’m going to watch and wait as it all unfolds…  and parts of me do too.

P.S.  After I had muddled through this whole idea of ‘One Word’ I found that a couple of my favorite blog-folk are linking up over here:   One Word

Who ever expected I’d get in on something in fashion?  ;)

Riding the Rolls and Yaws and Pitches

Five Minute Friday!  

So I hit a wall.  I hit a wall and I had a few days where I cried a lot and I felt miserable.  And I read comments that some of you sweet folks left.  And then I remembered.

I remembered the numbness.  I remembered how closing myself off from the awful feelings and trying to ‘suck it up and deal’ made me forget how to feel.  I remembered the “On and Off Switch” that got stuck.

I remembered John 1:1-18 and the admonishment to memorize it and root it deep into my brain and my heart and to remember that the WORD became FLESH.  That Jesus was HUMAN.  And that I am called to become more and more human–to follow hard after Him and to watch the work of redemption craft me into more and more of who I was created to be each day.

But I have to stay open.  I have to let myself feel.  I have to be ready to roll and yaw and pitch in this amazing journey of life.  I have to remember that sometimes those who are most blessed realize those blessings in circumstances that look more…  HARD than blessed to the naked eye.

So as I walk into this New Year…  I can’t imagine what kinds of curve balls and changes and new journeys it will bring.  I find myself apprehensive about new years because of the number of curve ball years it seems we’ve had.  And yet the lesson in that is that if I stay open to the every day….  If I take it just a day at a time, a moment at a time, an emotion at a time…  I can see the gifts of right now.  I can feel the feelings.  I can become more me.  And I can ride out the waves and the curve balls as they come.  After all, His grace has allowed me to this far.

Wall Vs. Val

I seem to have hit a wall.

I did really well at finding the light in the darkness for Christmas.  And it was quite a bumpy holiday.  Husband was gone and I felt that acutely.  We were delighted to have my folks visit but dismayed to find that the sickies that almost always follow them home hit them almost as soon as they walked in the door to a rather extreme degree.  Then Baby Girl got stomach flu.  And the kids version of swept up in magic didn’t look quiet and reverent this year, but loud and hyper with a side of obnoxious and disobedient flung in.  I went to bed Christmas Eve bone tired, but still I was finding a light in the darkness.  Christmas morning had it’s wide-eyed excitement and the glory of children playing and that was good for my heart too and then…

Baby girl hit a wall herself.  She had kept up close to her normal level of energy and playfulness until that afternoon–going on three days of stomach flu.  Then she got lethargic.  She laid on me and snuggled–which this little girl does NOT do.  She got progressively less responsive.  Finally she was barely holding up her little head.

So I went to the ER.  She was dehydrated and the doctor and I agreed that IV fluids made sense.  After four attempts of putting in the IV, she finally had fluids going in to her little foot as well as some Zofran for the nausea.  I read John and Abigail Adams letters on my Kindle while she dozed on my lap.  I tried very hard not to feel too sorry for myself.

On the drive back,as I thought about going home and climbing the stairs to our empty bed, a loneliness hit me too my core.  Some little shred of denial was lifted and I felt the distance from my husband and the number of days until we’ll see him again deeply.  He isn’t just at work.  He isn’t on a short trip only to return any time.  He is gone…  to the other side of the world, gone.  With days and days and days until we’ll see him again.

And I am here taking  babies to the ER, being bled on to get an IV placed.  I am here solely responsible for these three babes we love so much.  I am here in charge of bills, taxes, and garbage days.  I am here…  And he is there.

The reality came crashing in and a little piece of me crumbled.

I woke up the next morning with more than the post-Christmas thud going on.  The sleeplessness didn’t help.  What I felt though was real and deep and raw and undeniable.

Back to the Urgent Care again last night because baby girl was heading back to a place that looked listless to me and while we came home with the good news that she was not dehydrated our trip made me miss talking to my husband.  Then the phone finally rang late at night and while the phone call was a decent length and gave us time to catch up on the surface of things the hanging up rent me in two.

That raw, unchecked emotion.

It feels something like despair.

I’m angry at myself for being here.  A month in I should be finding my groove and starting to feel the empowering feelings of, “I really can do this.  We’re going to make it after all, Mary Tyler Moore.”  I should be hitting my stride and laughing in the face of deployment doldrums and gremlins alike.

Somehow though, I’m not.  I’ve read pithy little blogs about how to suck it up and deal with deployments here and there searching for people who haven’t hit their stride like they were supposed to either.  The only place that seems to call it like they see it in the same way I call it like I see it has been Her War, Her Voice.  For my third deployment, and fourth major separation, these feelings sure don’t line up with what I expected a ‘seasoned’ Navy wife to feel.

A new blog-friend of mine wrote a beautiful post about  how God is calling her to contentment right now in the midst of her deployment.  She wrote about how she is being convicted not to rush things until her husband gets home and to be grateful for the every day blessings she sees around her.

As I read the post though, instead of feeling comforted, I was scared.  My heart just wanted to hide.  While part of me *is* trudging on and at least doing the bare minimum of what I need to do to keep us all going, another part of me wants to curl up into a ball until he gets home.  I keep trying to talk myself into setting some goals and making this time an opportunity for me to thrive and not merely survive.  I keep trying to call myself back to the Counting of Graces that Ann Voskamp urges us to.

But my heart feels leaden to it all.  And that scares me.

Have I hit my wall?  Have I hit my limit?  Did the weariness of the seasons previous to this never get fully addressed leaving me less-equipped to take on this deployment?  Am I just out of practice?  Is it the short notice factor?  Am I, as I wondered at the end of our last sea tour when we thought that perhaps we’d be getting out after our shore tour, just not cut out for this lifestyle?

Am I deceived by the ‘mostly together’ appearance of other military wives–do they have their days and nights like those that I’ve had here lately too?  Are the boot straps and big girl panties sometimes missing at their houses?

Is it…  could it be…  Just exhaustion and PMS layered on top of one another?

I don’t have answers or a tidy little bow for this one.  I’m still in it.

I’m talking to God about it.  At least some.  I’m trying to be open to whatever work He may be doing in and through this–even in and through this wall that I seem to have smacked up against.

Though part of me feels despondent I am not completely despondent and it’s entirely possible that I will wake up tomorrow or sometime this weekend or next week feeling the beginnings of ‘the groove and empowerment’ phase creeping in.

Until then, I’m going to sit in this and try not to flinch.  I’m going to try not to yell at myself for  wishing we could fast forward until the time he’ll be in our arms again even as I try not to get stuck in a black hole of wishing we could be doing anything but this.

And soon, I will find that light again.

 

 

In Which History is Made and the Laundry Gets Folded

My first year of college I had a dynamic history professor named Tim Kneeland for one of those Freshman level American History classes that came first thing in the morning.  One of the assignments that first semester was to interview someone who had been alive at significant points during the past century and ask what their first-hand recollections were about those events.

I asked my Gramma H. what she remembered about the end of World War II. While my grandfather didn’t serve in the war, they were young adults at the time.  I expected that she’d tell me about some grand-scale celebration in the tiny town of Walnut Grove for the victory in Europe or Japan.  I don’t know why I thought a place that small could sustain a ticker-tape parade or why I thought that in a one-horse town like that folks would flood the streets.  I was incredibly surprised when my grandmother told me she couldn’t recall that day.  She didn’t remember anything significant about it.  Here she’d lived through the history, but had no meaningful recollection of it?  How was that possible?

I was folding laundry last night and watching some more episodes of The Wonder Years when I happened to click over to Google News and saw that the last troops had crossed the border out of Iraq and that the war there, at least, is officially over.

There were no ticker tape parades last night and no one flooded the streets even here in base housing.  I read the news and went back to my laundry.

As I folded though, I thought about the lack of pomp and circumstance I was experiencing. I heard the war was over and I folded another t-shirt?  Really?

The fact of the matter is for me, though the war is over, my husband is still speeding away from me to the other side of the world.  That is a surreal feeling.  For the things happening in my every day life I don’t feel like celebrating.    I do celebrate greatly for those who are coming home from Iraq and will be able to be with their families for this Christmas.  That is a true joy, it goes without saying.  I do not begrudge them their homecoming because my husband just left in the least.  They get a respite from the time apart and those days and nights of worry and fear.  I am happy with them and for them.

But for me, the deployment continues and the absence continues.  The war is over, but my husband’s job goes on.

I also feel the same conflicted emotions that many Americans feel about this war.  It has been speculated about and pontificated on so much that I can’t make heads or tails of it.  I felt ok with not being able to make heads or tails of it before, but somehow at its ending I wanted a black and white way to feel.

I thought of the thousands of service members and families for whom this war will never really be over:  Those who lost a loved one, those who were injured, those suffering TBI or PTSD even if they look “fine” on the outside.  I thought about the ripple effects that will have on our society for years to come.  I thought of the impact that all this has had on the citizens of Iraq….

I don’t know how to feel at the “end” of this war.  I don’t know if it’s really “over.”  I know better than most that our troops are still out their serving.  They’re still willingly saying good-bye to their loved ones for months at a time to do a job that this country has asked them to do.   I wonder about those serving in Afghanistan and even those on my husband’s ship…  Do they feel forgotten right now as the media trumpets the word “over” repetitiously and the politicians pat themselves on the backs?

I thought of all of these things and I folded another t-shirt, and another…  I thought about the “endings” of the other wars in our history.  What did it feel like at the end of Korea?  At the end of Vietnam?  Is there always, in some way, an understated quality to the news as the world keeps spinning and the laundry keeps being folded?  Are the black and whites always a little muddy grey in the end–even in wars that we believe in hindsight made sense like World War II?  Thousands upon thousands of individuals were killed, untold devastation was wrought.  Did even the greatest generation find it hard to know how to feel or what to celebrate?

I folded more laundry and I continued to feel the absence of my husband still so acutely even as the headlines said, “Over.”

And I thought about my Grandma…  who had no recollection of the ending of World War II.

When my grandkids ask me about what I recall about the end of the war in Iraq what will I have to say?  Will I tell them that their grandfather was on an aircraft carrier speeding miles and miles away from me…  that I read the headlines and quietly kept folding laundry?