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What you should never say to a military spouse.

When my husband was in college, it never occurred to either of us that he would have a career in the military. Once he graduated, we weighed the pros and cons and within a few months he joined the Navy and took his oath.

Before we knew it, it was time for him to go to OCS (Officer Candidate School) and as much as I prepared myself for my husband (of less than a year) to be gone for months, I found that I was far from prepared.

He was under enough stress when it came to getting ready but I unfortunately added to his stress.

In some ways I felt like he was abandoning me and I started picking ridiculous fights with him. I found that by doing so, I was distancing myself from him emotionally so it would be easier when he was gone.

I quickly learned that I would just end up feeling guilty and wanted to tell my husband how sorry I was but it wasn’t like I could just pick up the phone.

For the next 12 years his deployments never got easier and I missed him just as much as the first time he was deployed.

Sure, I became more self-sufficient all of those times I was alone (I pride myself on being somewhat of a plumbing ninja with all of the sinks and toilets I fixed over the years) but there was a huge part of me missing.

My husband.

Being a military wife is like being on the most thrilling but at the same time one of the scariest rollercoaster rides that you can experience.

Like being a mom.

I’ll never forget when I was 8 months pregnant with my daughter and we were living in Washington, D.C. My husband came home from work and I just knew something was going on. He told me they want to send him to Afghanistan in the next few weeks and he’ll be gone for a year.

I felt so selfish and guilty that I wanted somebody else to be deployed instead of my husband but after a very tense next couple of weeks, someone else was sent after all.

It turned out that once the powers that be found out my husband was recovering from a broken foot, he was deemed too much of a risk.

In all the years that he’s been in the Navy, the one thing that’s like fingers on a chalkboard to me are the times he was deployed and the most frequent comment I would get is Well, that’s what you signed up for.

It feels like the person saying that is dismissing my feelings. That’s probably why my mother-in-law was the worst offender when my husband was deployed.

Just because my husband is in the military doesn’t mean that it’s easier when he leaves or that we miss each other less. I feel in some ways it’s much harder because of the danger involved.

So, if there’s a military spouse in your life, give them a shoulder to lean on. And a hug. Hugs are always good.

Do you have a spouse in the military or one that travels frequently? How do you handle the separation? What would you like people to know?

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Things that go bump in the night.

My husband doesn’t believe in ghosts or hauntings unlike me. The house we currently live in has two ghosts.  

About 5 years ago when my husband and I were living in the D.C. area, I swore our apartment was haunted. I felt an angry presence in the dining room and in the living room there was a very gentle female presence.

One time I got up in the middle of the night and went to the kitchen for some water.

When I walked through the living room I came to a screeching halt when I saw this cloudy, tall figure. I ran my ass back to the bedroom, jumped back into bed, and woke up my hubby to tell him there’s something in the living room.

He wasn’t amused and went back to sleep.

I couldn’t go to sleep after that and was lying awake in bed most of the night.

The one that really scared the hell out of me is when I was asleep one early morning and I felt someone grab my shoulder and shake me awake. I knew it was my husband but when I turned, nobody was there.

I started to think my husband was trying to scare me but when I got out of bed, I saw that he was taking a shower in his bathroom. The hairs on my arms stood up and I started to panic.

My husband kept insisting that it wasn’t him and after that I dreaded sleeping in the bedroom. There were also alot of times when I would be sitting on the couch and felt like I was being stared at.

Just a few months after the hummingbird was born, we moved and I was so happy to be out of that place.

Have you ever had a spooky experience? Do you have a favorite scary movie you like to watch on Friday the 13th?

~~~~~

Stephanie April 14, 2012 at 09:52
 
My husband (at the time fiance) and I visited his grandfather in Georgia and stayed overnight. My engagement ring had belonged to his grandmother who’d died the year before. We were sleeping in separate beds so I was alone, and in the middle of the night I woke up from a dead sleep to feel the engagement ring on my finger moving. Not in a “shift-as-you-sleep” way, but MOVE! I told Bill about it the next morning and he said it must have been his grandmother checking me out. We’d talked on the phone, but we’d never met. She must have approved of me!
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Banging my head against a spike would be more fun.

This is a totall recall post which is something I repost because I’m being too much of a lazy ass  because I like that I can look back and see what I was doing then. 

I wrote this when we were making the move from D.C. to Northern California in July 2010.  I would never want to do that move again unless we flew. Driving was awful, especially since the hummingbird could only tolerate being in her carseat for 5 or 6 hours which made the move much longer.

I could swear I’ve already used this as a total recall post so if I did, pretend you’ve never read it before. ;^)

 

Banging my head against a spike would be more fun

July 22, 2010

The hubby will be known as buttmunch for this post.

Cue the Law and Order music.

DUH DUH

The buttmunch and I were packing and trying to get everything together since we were going to a hotel that night. I had the little girl’s things packed and went to get my things together. I asked my buttmunch if he could go downstairs and get some toys for the little girl.

DUH DUH

Around 8pm that night we were on the way to the hotel and the buttmunch went back to the house to pack some more. Soon after, I put the little girl to bed. I called the buttmunch a few times to remind him what to bring back to the hotel.

DUH DUH

The next morning my buttmunch went back to the house since the movers were coming, so it was just me and my daughter. After breakfast I went over to a box that the buttmunch brought and looked through it for toys.

DUH DUH

There weren’t any there so I looked through a few bags. Not there. I looked through her bag, my bag, the buttmunch’s bag. Nada. I was starting to panic but before I went into freak out mode, I looked through EVERYTHING again. Nope.

DUH DUH

It was raining outside and there wasn’t anything for her to play with inside. The little girl just had a few books I had packed in her bag and normally she loves to “read” her books. She must have smelled the fear on me because when I would give her a book, she would throw it on the ground and give me a bitch, please look.

Then she started to run around the room and whine. It was her special whine. The kind that makes me feel like my head is going to explode any minute.

DUH DUH

I then called the buttmunch. When he answered I politely and in a very calm tone, and not at all yelling *coughnotcough*, told him that we didn’t have any toys at the hotel room. He couldn’t bring the toys by (and I didn’t have the car) since he was waiting for the movers and told me that I “had the stroller, so there was that“.

May I remind you that it was raining.

DUH DUH

Buttmunch.

DUH DUH

I found a pack of tic tacs that she grabbed at the store the day before. She wouldn’t let them go and chewed off most of the wrapper so they were ours for keeps. Those only amused her for a few minutes.

While the little girl was racing around the room, I sat on the couch dazed from the lack of caffeine. I contemplated dragging the both of us to the hotel lobby so I could get my hands on some coffee and the little girl could run around in a bigger space.

To get to the lobby we had to go outside and walk what seemed like a mile in the pouring rain, so I decided it was best to just stay in the room.

DUH DUH

While I was twitching around from my caffeine withdrawal and a whiny toddler, I found two plastic spoons. I thought “Yay, she loves spoons!” A few seconds after giving her one, she dropped it on the nasty hotel room carpet. The same carpet that turned her white socks black within a few hours.

So I threw it away and gave her the second spoon. Same thing. Finally, I just let her start throwing things out of our bags onto the nasty carpet. The carpet Dateline NBC says is covered in fecal matter, salmonella, and sperm. I guess there are a lot of chickens that stay at hotels and have booty sex.

While the little girl was going through the bags, she struck gold. She found a Ziploc bag full of tampons, the ones that come in bright colors. She was entranced with my bag o’ tampons. The little girl started roaming around the room with the bag, shaking it and holding it above her head.

This kept her occupied for about 10 minutes. While she was playing with her new toy, I was looking through the bags again, not for toys but for anything resembling caffeine. No such luck.

DUH DUH

After she got bored with the bag, I spent the next seven hours repeatedly singing the Elmo Duck Song, Elmo’s Song, and letting her play with my cell phone (which surprisingly still works). I also got quite a workout staying in a room that wasn’t child-proofed. Finally after one of the longest. days. ever, the buttmunch came back to the room.

DUH DUH

Hmmm, what’s that sound? Is it me saying no sex for a week? Well, that’s nothing new.

*We’re still not in California. It has taken us forever to drive across the country and as of this morning we are in New Mexico, about an hour from Arizona. I finally got my hands on a new laptop (thanks to my sweet hubby, the buttmunch).

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My antidepressant has made my downtown lady depressed. *cue the more you know rainbow*

After being on an antidepressant for the last several months, my lady friend down south is not a happy camper. I know that’s one of the side effects but c’mon, you’d think that by now they would’ve come up with something to help liven up a woman’s Southern lady.

So, I can either be depressed and have my sex drive fall off a cliff or I can be on medication and have my sex drive be obsolete. Yay!

I’ve gone so long without sex that I think my virginity grew back. Too bad I didn’t regain my bladder control too.

I tried a lower dose of my medication but it didn’t go well. I’m still not at a place where I can do that yet.

My doctor really thinks the med I’m on is the best for me since it’s for depression and anxiety.

I was on a 30 Day Shred kick, hoping more exercise would help, but recently I’ve been working out for a few minutes and then giving up. I go and grab some chips or ice cream and I watch while Jillian Michaels and her exercise buddies sweat their asses off. Better them than me, right? bwahahaha

I got a $30 bottle of an herbal supplement at Whole Foods that’s supposed to help a woman’s libido but it hasn’t worked. It would probably help if I opened the bottle and actually took it though.  ;^)

Even though I talk to my therapist about everything else, it’s hard to bring up the loss of my sex drive. Instead I write about it and send it off into the interwebs because that’s how I roll.

So, here’s a question to you dear readers. If you’ve been on an antidepressant at one time or another and your sex drive became non-existant, did you just wait it out? Shots of Vodka? If you’d like to answer privately then please don’t hesitate to email me. When it comes to my hubby, I really want to tap that.

~~~~~

**Make sure to check out the new website What The Flicka? that was founded by actress Felicity Huffman and where I’m a contributing writer. For weeks I’ve been dying to say something but I was afraid I’d jinx it.

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