213

Today is day 213, and the seven month marker of this deployment. Seven months ago today, I kissed my husband.I watched my children hug his neck tighter, I think, than they ever had before. I looked in his eyes and told him that he was going to be ordered to do a lot of things but his one order from me was to "Come home". I stood helplessly as he tried to keep it together while he held his children. I listened as one of his chiefs told me kindly as they walked away, "We'll take care of him ma'am". I heard myself respond, "You better". I held my two sweet little ones as they crumbled in the parking lot. I felt the cutting wind on my face as we walked to the car, and I drove away slowly, staring at the jet that would take my husband, my best friend, away from me for a time.

Looking back over the past eleven years that I have been with this incredible man, I sometimes think how my life could have been. See, I was that girl who came from a small town, who probably, if following due course, was never going to leave her town. I was going to raise my children and marry the safety net. The safety net has a name, and he was one of my closest friends for many years. He fit the bill...on paper. On paper, he was everything that would provide a good life. He came from a wealthy background, had a good family upbringing, had a good education and had his future laid out for him. I would never want for anything. But I did.

I wanted unpredictability. I wanted adventure. I wanted the most ground-breaking, passionate love that I had ever experienced. One man held that, and one man did not.
Enter Mike.

From the get-go, Mike was unlike anyone I had ever dated. He was daring, comical, gracious, and grabbed life by the horns. He was everything that Safety Net was not. He presented a life that would be changing, swirling, adventurous--a roller coaster versus a merry-go-round. I fell hard for the roller coaster. The thing is, when you take a ride on a merry-go-round, once is usually enough, and you're done. When you take a ride on a roller coaster, with it's speed and dips and hills and crests, you want to go again and again and again. Once is never enough, at least it's not for me.

Marrying Mike was probably one of the tremendously scary things I have ever done. I knew that it would mean countless days and nights apart, navigating a marraige where we would be apart more than together. It would mean learning how to not just be a wife, but a Navy wife--something infinitely more insane than just being a wife. I didn't know what was going to happen to us, but looking back on it now, I realize that I didn't want to marry a safety net--I wanted to find safety in someone amazing. And now, even when he's 8000 miles away, I've felt safer than I ever have in my life because I found safety IN him, not BECAUSE of him.

Seven months. 213 days. 5112 hours. Only a bit more to go...