Coming Up For Air

How do I begin to recap the past twelve months? It would be like trying to describe an internal combustion engine to a three-year-old or pantomime open heart surgery to a Labrador Retriever. Almost every major event that usually happens through out the course of ten or fifteen years to a young couple has happened to us in the last year. Intense is as close as I can come to encompassing all that has transpired without writing a novel on this computer screen. This blog is about where we're going, not where we've been. Bits and pieces of our history will be woven into the fabric of my stories, but only give pertinent background information or to explain a personality quirk.

To better understand my current state of being, our recent history must be considered. It is all a matter of numbers. Ten months ago, I gave birth to our first daughter. Three days after that, we were legally married in our living room with six witnesses. Six weeks later, my husband was unemployed. As our family fell on hard times, I became the bread winner. I let my milk dry up and put my uniform back on, working every day but Friday to make ends meet; that's six days a week, for anyone who doesn't like to think too hard about these things. This insane schedule continued, with a small baby sporadically crying in my ear at night and a husband asking what was for dinner, for months.

After nearly half a year of insanity, I was ready to break. At just twenty years old, I had already handled more than most women my age could even dream of handling. My then fiancee and I had gotten pregnant, I had moved out of my mother's house, I decided to put school on hold and we moved into our own place. For some reason, I was in an awfully big hurry to grow up before I could even get legally drunk. So much for drinking Champagne at my own wedding. Actually, I wasn't trying to grow up. In truth, I would have been perfectly happy to have finnished school, started my career, saved a little money, and then gone on with babies and marriage and so on. The order just got a little messed up. I've never had a good memory; I guess I just forgot how things were supposed to go.

Now, I'm a Navy wife. As I left for work one morning, I was exhausted, smelly and irrational. I told my husband, tersley, that I wanted him to go online and find a job before I got home for the evening. The last thing I remember hearing him say had something to do with waste management or driving the city bus. When I got home, he said he wanted to be in the Navy. More specifically, he wanted to be a SEAL. I was raised as an Air Force brat and felt deeply at ease with being a Navy wife. The Department of Defense [DoD] typically takes care of it's dependent wives and children. Families are always welcomed in to the Army, Navy, Air Force and Reserves. But a SEAL? To me, it was like hanging a bull's eye around his neck and handing out AK-47s. SEALs are single men, with nothing at home but a dog and a stack of Playboy's. My husband had me and our daughter; what did he need a big gun and a swamp for? And how can a souless, heartless machine like the United States Navy make me so damn jealous, make me glow green with envy like a spurned teenager? Ugh.

My husband is coming back to the Bay Area tomorrow night. Then, we're putting everything we own into a seventeen foot U-Haul, rolling the Honda on to a trailer, and driving across country to our new home in Charleston, South Carolina. It is literally the other side of the country. I'm actually starting to regret all of the times I wished that I lived in the East Coast, that I had 3,000 miles between me and my mother. It's amazing, the things that we think of when we're young and angry and aimless. At that point, New York City sounds like heaven. But now, I wish we weren't leaving the state. And then I can't wait to go.