Six Days Gone

I feel like I can't cope . . . with anything.

I am frustrated, irritable and short-tempered.

Today is day six of six. That is six days of my husband being gone. He will get home late tonight. I hope to be asleep but I probably won't. I will most likely still be awake long after he has entered dream-land. I still have a hard time finding sleep. It is still a love-hate relationship.

I don't know how many days my husband will be home for. He has recurrent training due. So, depending on the flights his company has him booked on, he may drive or fly (depending on the one that gives him more days at home) to the state where he has to complete his recurrent training. He may be home for one day, or for three. Our life, it seems, is always dependent on something centering around his job.

He was not home for many days last week. It seems the only proof I have of him being home is the mess he leaves in his wake. The dirty dishes and the increased laundry. I feel like a single mom but with the responsibility and increased work load one has with a husband.

I'm having a pity party for myself right now. I hope you don't mind. I am just sick and tired of my life and my daughter's life being centered around what her Daddy does for a living. Even she has started to express frustration with it and it breaks my heart. I would like, just once, to not be the person that has to constantly change my schedule for my husbands. I know a marriage is give and take but I feel like I am doing all the giving. If things start falling through the cracks, if things were left undone, I am the one my husband turns to to fix it. I can rarely turn to him because he usually isn't available when things start breaking down. I am the one to fill in the gaps.

I know there are worse things. Trust me, I really know. I am living it right now.

There is another anniversary approaching and still those heavy, empty arms. The reality is setting in.

I can't cope.

My daughter is at that age where every interaction is a difficult one.

She is strong-willed, independent and stubborn.

I prayed for her to be independent and strong-willed. I don't want her to fall down and give in when faced with temptation. I don't want her to break and fall to pieces the first time she comes across a difficult situation. I want her to be strong and independent. I just don't want her to be that and two-years-old at the same time.

I want to run away. I want someone to be here to fill in the gaps when the holes are consuming me. I want the luxury of leaving the house for thirty minutes (without my daughter) when I need a breather and a little perspective. I don't want to have to wait six days to get that. I usually don't get that even when he's home. He has an agenda when he's home and so, once again, everything gets arranged around that and I am back at square one.

I am not coping well. With all of this responsibility and with being a mom who misses her children.

The dinners that need to be fixed just to have a child not eat any of it. The clothes that need to be washed. The furniture that needs to be cleaned. The items that need to be bought at the grocery. The dirty bathrooms. My child who argues with everything I tell her, who won't eat but complains of being hungry. The child who won't sleep but has a melt down because there's a crease in her jeans that she doesn't want there. That schedule. The one we get every month where I let out a long sigh and realize my husband will be in the clouds more than he will be at home. It all adds up and I can't cope with it all. I want a husband who is home.

My babies and that grave that haunts me. That place I can't go. That place, just to think about, causes me to stop breathing. I want to go but I can't. If I go, then its another reminder of what really happened.

I want my babies back!

I feel like all my walls are caving in.

I fill so empty and how can I continue to be for the loved ones in my life when I have nothing left to give?

All the little things, all those little jobs that being a wife and a mother require that usually bring joy, are weighing on me. That grave and this grief and I can't cope.

I am snapping. I scream when it gets to be too much. I accuse my husband of not understanding, of being selfish and I tell him that we can't continue to function as a family that centers their days, their plans, their life around his job.

That is not fair and I know it. But when that weight overwhelms, I am not thinking of fairness, I'm thinking of how I can survive all of this.

This doesn't negate how I would and will follow him anywhere to support what it is he loves to do. But the following and the supporting doesn't negate the frustration and the exhaustion either.

I am sick of changing my plans for his planes. I am sick of canceling or rearranging last minute because his plane got delayed . . . again and he's stuck in a different time zone, yet again.

I am more than a pilot's wife, an almost three-year-olds mother, a stay-at-home-mom-who-used-to-love-her-job-as-a-nurse, a woman, a mother who buried two of her children.

I get lost in the shifting schedules, the dirty dishes, the chaos of clean and dirty clothes, that suitcase, the sifting and floating of the dust throughout the house, the grieving and the wishing and the missing. And it all consumes so much of my energy.

I know I am more than all of that and that life is much more than all of this but I can't find it and I can't feel it and I'm wondering if this life was only meant to be one where good is but a memory and stress and sadness are what is to greet me every time a corner has been turned.

The weight of it all is weighing me down, breaking me, exhausting me and I can't cope.





Stephanie