catch up...

Seeing as it's been quite a long time, i guess that means that I need to play catch up. June- I worked a lot. July-I worked more. August-I got to go home and see my family and to my surprise found out that Dustin was coming home for R&R a little earlier than expected. September-Waited for what seemed like the longest 13 days of my life and then it was time for the moment that I thought would never come.

The time for his plane to arrive had changed several times, as plans usually do with the army. He messaged me early that morning and told me that the plane was to arrive around 1. I made plans with the photographer to meet there at 12:15, giving us both time to get beyond security and for her to hide so that Dustin wouldn't know or be bothered with a camera in his face after just completing a four day journey. I had bought new makeup. I had found the outfit. I just needed the husband. The distance between Elizabethtown and Louisville International Airport is a 36 mile drive. It's about a 45 minutes if the traffic is good and on that day, traffic was going to be good for me. I left my house at about 11:30, giving myself ample time to get there so as to not be in a rush. I'd be been driving for about ten minutes when I realized that I hadn't checked facebook in a few hours. I remember the thought going through my head that surely my husband wouldn't send me a facebook message to tell me if his flight had changed again and even if he had, I would get a notification on my darling iphone that never stops notifying me of everything else.- Sidenote: The morning of September 14, Facebook sent out an email informing facebookers that they would be changing the notification system that day. If you wanted to be notified for things like a message from your husband returning from Afghanistan, you needed to manually go in and reapply those things...I was extremely excited that morning, the time I usually check my emails. I did in fact see that message, but I did in fact not read a single word of it. - So as i'm checking facebook on the way to the airport, I see that I have three messages. As a sudden feeling of doom makes it way all the way to the pit of my stomach, sure enough, I see that all three are from him. They go on to say that he will be now arriving at 11:40. As I quickly glance at the clock I am just in time to watch in slow motion as the numbers switch from from 11:39 to 11:40. I am sure, had you seen me in my car at that exact instance you would have perhaps thought that I had been possessed by Satan himself or maybe that someone had told me the zombie apocalypse had started, but in that moment a hour of makeup application and the countless flat iron burns suffered at the attempt to curl my air all were made pointless. I think i cried. I think I screamed. I know I slammed the accelerator all the way down. I called my mom crying. I called the photographer crying. As the photographer is trying to tell me something, of course I see red and blue lights flashing behind me. As I entertained the thought of trying to outrun the cop, i hang up without saying anything and pull over. Normally, I would not have hoped to get out of a ticket when the officer approaches your window and says your were doing 98 in a 65, but as the words leave his mouth, the tears well up in my eyes and the events of the past 10 minutes come tumbling out in a somewhat pitiful cry. As he looks at my license and back at me, I was almost certain I was about to get the most expensive ticket of my life. The next words that came from his mouth were some of the nicest things that these 22 year old ears have ever heard. He plainly said, "Well. It seems like you have places to be. Best be going now." and I was on my way again. I get around to calling the photographer back to tell her to call the whole thing off and tell her the story when she says the next best thing I could ever wish to hear. My photographer arrived on a whim to the airport an hour early. She can see Dustin and said she'd go explain everything and let him know I was coming. I drove like a mad man and made it to the airport in 20 minutes. As if it was something right out of a movie, I missed the parking entrance the first time, circled back around, parked crooked, and took off running through the parking garage... in cowboy boots. The Louisville Airport is three levels. I had not stopped to consider that I needed to ask them where they would be. I ran across moving sidewalks, made it to the second level, ran the whole length of baggage claim looking for that army uniform that i've washed so many times. As I jumped on the escalator for the third floor, suddenly in the back corner of the baggage claim I see a lady with a large camera and a pair of army combat boots with a man attached to them that I vaguely recognize. I run down the escalator that is going up. As i'm watching him with half a football field between us, it is this very moment that I had always wondered so often what would be going through my head. Would i just stop and break down crying? Would I walk slowly and just take it all in? There was only one thought that came at that moment. It was simple and plain. I need him. I ran. He braced himself for a collision...and then he was there. Those next few minutes made up for 9 months of being apart.

In movies you see people only spend a week together, but yet they've decided it's their soulmate. I have always been a skeptic to that, but after the two weeks together that I was lucky enough to have with him, I would've decided that same thing. Had I not already put a ring on that finger, I would've done it right then an there. There are few things in your life that will make you not take a person for granted; a deployment is one of those things. I am grateful for every single moment i get to share with that man, even if they are few and far between. I say that not to be mushy, but as a reminder to myself for the three months of tough times that are still ahead. So that brings me up to speed on everything that has happened. Today is the first day of October, it is also the first day of the last leg of the wait for Dustin to come home. Pray for him as he has to head back and God speed to the months that follow.

6 months later...

It's been 170 days, almost 25 weeks, 243,300 something minutes since i said goodbye to my best friend....but who's counting. In 6 months Dustin and I have gone on a sometimes tumultuous journey. Deployments- they will make strong marriages stronger and weak marriages weaker. Starting out, I will admit that I wasn't quite sure which category we would fall in. As the first couple of months slowly dragged by, I was sure that we would be labeled the later, but as time continued, I figured it out. You adapt, you grow stronger. There are so many hard things that come with the whole journey. It's hard seeing your husband's face 7,000 miles away and wanting to cry the entire conversation. It's hard looking at the pictures and wondering how this can possibly be the man that you walked down the aisle to a little more than a year ago. It's hard trying to be a newlywed and figuring out all the little things when you only get to talk once a week and there's no chance for makeup "fun" after a blowup. There are a lot really hard things that come with the term "army wife." It is so easy to focus on them all and let it bombard you, but my gosh, there are a whole lot of really easy things that come with it too..It's very easy to get away with not showering. Who needs to shave when there's no one here to impress. ( I do shower and I do shave...it was a phase.) It's easy to get use to having complete and utter control of the tv. Not only have I not watched a single sporting event, but I haven't had to watch one horror movie or an episode of South Park. I have gotten the opportunity to learn self reliance...I mow, i don't own a weed eater so i sit on the sidewalk and cut it with scissors. I carry the heavy groceries by myself, I get to stare at my car engine all on my own now and act like I know exactly what's wrong. It's easy to not cheat on my husband...military wives get a bad rap. After all the horror stories, the dear john letters, wives running off with their husband's money, I was beginning to think maybe it was an impossible feat for a mere woman. It's not. It's really quite simple.

In the beginning, I would not have said that there was one thing that was easy about this whole situation. In the beginning, i'm was almost positive that this was going to be the death of me. But somewhere along the way something changed, I changed. I got a little bit stronger, I pushed myself, I made a major attitude adjustment. The one thing that I was failing to see was that I picked this. I picked to live a year without my husband and I picked to marry a man that would always place God and country ahead of me. I had to realize that every day had to be centered on daily deliberate attitude. I was well aware that I wasn't capable of doing it alone, i'd tried. I'd failed. It had affected me, it had affected my marriage, and it had affected the amount of minutes on my cell bill from crying to my family so much. It was a conscious decision to stop trying to simply survive every single day. I had to decide to live, to live for me and enjoy the year that I have been given to get over the past and find myself...trust me, i apparently need the whole year. I've had to wake up each day and purposefully choose joy! My heart and soul have been happier because of it. All this saying, there's not a day, scratch that minute, that Dustin doesn't cross my mind. I am constantly waking up in the middle of night worried and having to pray for him. I have played out every single scenario for his homecoming that is humanly possible and I will talk about him at any given opportunity given the chance. I am happy though, for where our life has led us at this moment in time, I am happy. I always remember though, that sometimes I am happy when he's gone, but I am ALWAYS happy when he returns.

Like mother, like daughter

My first memory that I can remember is of my mom. She's pregnant with my little sister and she's showing me her belly explaining to me how to be a big sister. I remember my favorite outfit to play dressup in was the dress that my mom wore on her first date with my dad. In my world, it was a place of magic with princesses and princes and dragons and knights and there was never a time that she told me it wasn't. She encouraged us to dream, to live life in color and i've done that and never looked back. She sped to bring me clothes the time some girls in middle school poured water down my pants just so that I could face them in the same day. Even in the midst of what at the time seemed like her biggest failure, my mom was the one with a deathlock grip on me just telling me over and over that she was going to fight for me. When I called her from 800 miles away, asking if 32 days was too soon to plan a wedding, she was my biggest advocate.

The thing about my mom is that she is brilliant and smart, insightful and pretty. Just that right there is a whole lot of woman to live up to. There is not a single thing that she wouldn't do for her daughters. I was the "difficult" child. She always had a parenting book laying around. I assumed their purpose was to help figure me out, so I of course read them all to figure out how she'd classify me and do the opposite. She countered and listened to them on audio tape...away from me. There was nothing she wasn't willing to do for us, including going to class with us, blocking that boy's number that was a skeeze, and reminding us every single day that we were a priority. It's got to be hard raising three girls...It's got to be hard raising me. The difficulty now is not trying to live up to my mom, that is close to impossible. It's being the daughter that she has always deserved.

I'm not a mom by any stretch of the means, but I do nanny for two young preteen girls. I have pulled them off of each other, i get asked a lot of questions about the male anatomy, and their young brutal honesty is not always a treasure. I have to call her at least a couple times a day asking what to do in the situation and her usual response is a laugh while she tells me it's my payback. I find myself doing exactly what I swore i'd never do; being my mother...I always tell them to make good choices. I never found the relevance in her constantly telling us this until I was making bad choices, this also gives my girls ample time to practice their eye rolling. I tell them constantly that God is relentless in his pursuit for you...my little spitfire instantly fired back that i'd just made God sound like a stalker. When my twelve year old is throwing a fit and won't talk, I relish that few minutes because it's absolute silence, i just never knew why my mom seemed so happy when I did it. Unfortunately, for my 13 year old self I am basically my mom incarnate...this is very fortunate for my 22 year old self and my sanity included.

the wedding post

This coming Sunday will mark a HUGE accomplishment for both Dustin and me. On Easter Sunday, we will celebrate our first year of marriage. To think that a year ago tomorrow I was loaded up in my parents car and on my way to Fort Benning, Georgia to celebrate Dustin graduating from army basic and to marry him after only even coming to the conclusion a mere 35 days earlier that marrying this boy sounded like a fantastic idea to me. We planned a wedding together through letters, 2 phone calls, and a 800 miles gap that could intimidate even the most coordinated wedding planner. Lucky for us though, things seemed to fall into place; I took this as a sign that this was exactly what we were suppose to do. It rained 5 inches on our wedding day, according to my mom, this was suppose to mean good luck for our marriage, but to me, it seemed like it could be the demise of the one day that all little girls dream about. Our outside wedding suddenly was changed to inside, my hair wouldn't curl, and while one best friend had been able to come last minute, the other 2 had school and there was no way around it. I should have been freaking out, i should have been the bridezilla that horror stories are based on, but I wasn't. I'm not a calm person, i worry entirely way too much and a calm demeanor is just not in my nature. I was calm. I was even calm on the inside. After watching Runaway bride about 500 times, I thought i should be trying to bolt and questioning what exactly it was that I was about to do. I wasn't nervous, I wasn't wondering whether he was going to show up or where my nearest exit was, I had one concern that day. I don't know when this obsession hit me or where I got it from, but it was the thing that I daydreamed about and had played it through my head a million times wondering how it would turn out. I wanted to see his face when I was walking toward him. I have been to enough weddings to know that the best part of the wedding is not when they say their vows or the flower girl is crying while she walks down the aisle and everyone laughs, but it's the moment that the doors swing open and for the first time the man standing at the front of the church with solemn eyes and hands folded neatly in front of him for the first time catches sight of HIS bride. Now, i'm not a boy, i don't understand what they think, but to me, in that moment, seeing the one person that God divinely created just for you, realizing that it is yours and yours alone, and seeing the perfection of God's plan in a girl dressed in white walking towards you should be one of the most daunting/exhilarating/breathtaking moments in your life. There was nothing more that I wanted then to see that realization flash across my husband's face. I wanted to be everything he deserved and I NEEDED to see that in his face when he looked at me. I got what I wanted. I remember those moments in every detail, from the click of my heels, to what part the song was at. I remember meeting his eyes and in that moment, not one thing could mar our perfection. We said "I do," and now, a hope, skip, and a jump later, we have been married a year. Now, 365 days later, I still find my husband breathtaking, even from a fuzzy camera over skype. We have struggled, we have fought, there have been tears and angry words, lonely nights and broken hearts, but there has also been sweet kisses, and dates, pictures from far away that keep marriages interesting and a promise from my groom that no matter what, he's going to hold my hand through it all and bring us back from this war that currently has taken grip on our lives. You don't marry a soldier without having a little bit of fight within yourself, also. So here is to the past year, Mr. Walser, we've made it this far, we might as well keep going. I have loved, I do love, and I will love you in the years that follow so come home soon, i miss you!

3 months, 6 days

It has been three months and 6 days since this fun thing called deployment introduced it's ugly face to us. If we're being honest, i'm not a fan, i don't know what person in their right mind would be. It has been a rough 95 days. Being a newlywed in a normal setting is hard enough, being a newlywed with only 4 months together under our belts and an ocean and few terrorists between us only adds to it. Marriage is just hard. My parents always told me that, they always just made it seem so easy and I thought that perhaps that would be a genetic trait that they'd pass down. I think they are really docile or just really good at waiting till we were asleep. When you're sitting in your front yard crying because the lawn mower won't start again, there's grass in your hair, and blood flowing down your leg from a flying stick, it's really hard to be docile and not want to bring your husband back from Afghanistan just to murder him. It hard not to curse him when you've tried rearranging furniture and have magically wedged a tv cabinet in the doorway, leaving you trapped. It is easy, however, to fall back head over heels with your husband when you get a surprise email with pictures with results from all that working out he's been doing. It's even easier to love him when he tells me he's proud of me for mowing and some how, the stick puncture and achey joints seem worth it. I choose to be married, i chose the life we're living and i'm doing it with my best friend. At the end of the day, i'm doing this all with my best friend. Not many people can say that their best friend has an eight pack going on ten that is theirs only....I can.

Wild At Heart

I started rereading a book called Wild At Heart today. Anytime i read this book, it makes me examine the men in my life. Oh, this book is about the desires, needs, and wants of a mans heart from a Godly perspective. The book is epic, it opens your eyes to a different view, at least it did for me. According to this book though, "deep in his heart, every man longs for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue." I can see that if i look at it through my husbands eyes. For as long as I've known Dustin, he has always talked of doing something dangerously heroic. He wanted to be that guy kicking down doors, blowing things up, and ripping things to shreds. He wanted an adventure so he went out and found him self an adventure. I honestly think that part of Dustin's attraction to me is my constant state of distress; he's always saving me from something, usually car related but a rescue none the less. My husband is a man's man and that's a reason i'm attracted to him. Rereading this book makes me love the army...let me explain. A big thing that John Eldredge hits on is the masculinity being sucked out of a man's heart and soul. We've put boys into this box; My friends that aren't married, they just say that they want a "nice guy" and todays world, that's the most that a majority of men can hope to become, especially in christian world. I didn't grow up dreaming to marry a really nice guy, i dreamt of a man that would bust down the door after slaying the dragon just to get to me. I didn't dream of a Mr. Rogers, I wanted Batman. We have forgotten who man was created after and for what purpose.

My closest friend in Elizabethtown has a little boy, he is 2 years old. If you want to see the lost desires of a man's heart, watch a little two year old boy. He's throwing things constantly or running or screaming and there is nothing that is going to stop him from it. He's all boy, there is no obstacle that's going to stop him from getting to that light switch. If i'd let Dustin, he'd probably still do all these things. It's all just something the boys are born with and somehow, as they grow up, they lose it. We end up teaching our boys that the desire to conquer the world is unattainable and that it's better just to be nice so we end up with a lot of really nice boys who don't know how to be men. I'm guilty of doing this: Dustin, stop unscrewing that. Dustin, you can't say that. Dustin, you can't do that. I'm trying to make my husband the Godly man that i've seen in church my whole life, but what if that's not the Godly man he was meant to be? For my husband, I know what he desires and I think it's true for all men. Bring to life the desire, bring to life the man. It comes down to restoring a Godly dream in the soul of a man- A desire to truly be a man, rather than a softened-neutered-nice-but-restrained-guy that the world has somehow dictated that Christian males should be. Nice men may be socially acceptable but in creating them we have snuffed out the very fire that God would have us fan in our pursuit of Him

The art of anger

I really think coming to the point of acceptance with all of this is a lot like the stages of grief. I only think this because my mood varies each day and i'm trying to find an excuse. Hopefully, by the time Dustin comes home, I will have dealt with it and can work on accepting that he's home. The five stages of grief-Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. There is no certain order, there's not a time set out for each. they kind of just come and go. I don't think i really bargain so we can count that out. I think tonight, i'm dealing with anger. I never thought that I would be angry at him for leaving. It's not something that I prepared myself for. It is completely irrational and it makes no sense, i'm completely aware of that, but it doesn't change anything, i'm mad. I'm mad that he has left me here alone to worry my brains out while he gets to be the hero. He is the hero and i would much rather be here than there, but he was suppose to be here too. I'm mad that there is a broken tree trunk in my yard that i can't lift and so there it will stay and all he told me was that he couldn't wait to see how big it was in September. I am mad that my whole world revolves around his schedule, but that the army doesn't have a set schedule. I'm mad that I can't ever tell him i'm mad because I don't want to give him something else to worry about. I'm mad that i'm mad because it's kept me up and I have to wake up in four hours.

The book of Jeremiah is slowly becoming on of my favorite books in the bible. Jeremiah was such an introvert, but he was called to be God's prophet. He warned the Jews over and over that they would fall if they didn't come back to God, and after so many ignored warnings, they did. There is a whole part where Jeremiah is just furious with God and you see him going back and forth. Our battles are completely different, mine is no where near his, but it's a battle none the less. Jeremiah was mad because he thought that God had abandoned and deceived him. I love Jeremiah because of his honesty. He's not afraid to admit that he's failed and is mad at God for it, he is always sure to praise him, but he feels like because he was this prophet of the most high God, that his words would fall on listening ears.God never promised that they would listen, in fact, He didn't promise him anything, but warned him that it wouldn't be easy. God was very clear when he told me that Dustin would be my husband and I think I was under this notion that since I was promised this perfect guy, that the journey would be easy. It has been anything but easy and I have been frustrated more times than I can count. I've cried more in the last year than I think i have in my whole life combined. It is hard to understand why God decided to give him to me now, when we would be apart all the time. In that though, I have to exam God's promise to me. He promised to give him to me, and he did; He's my husband, to have and to hold. He fulfilled his promise, and I guess this whole journey is a test to see how bad I wanted him, no where though did he say that it was going to be easy keeping him.

Tonight, i'm angry. Tomorrow, I may be fine or I could be a complete sob case eating cookie dough in our bed. I do know that that eventually, one day at a time, I will be fine and i'll laugh at myself, most likely in the morning, but I don't want to forget that each night like this is a step towards acceptance, not a step back.