By: Jaclyn
William and I met in February of 2007, on the internet, as much as I hate to admit that. I saw something he wrote in an online community and looked at the little picture of his face on the right of it, and I thought to myself, “I am going to marry that boy” — half-kidding, half-delusional. He had been in the Army less than a year, and I knew nothing about the military, only that I liked the idea of him in the uniform. Over the next few days, we’d text back and forth and he would call when he got off work. I would say how much I wanted to see him (he was in Texas, I was in New York), and he would tell me, “Just buy a plane ticket and fly out here.” And so I did.
A year later, I had been through basic training and AIT and was about to go to my first duty station in Germany. Things didn’t exactly work out with William, and I decided I wanted the benefits of the Army for myself. I was still in love, though, and he was leaving for his first deployment to Afghanistan in a few months. I flew back to Texas to spend a week with him. A week after that, I was 5,000 miles away, sitting in my barracks room and holding a positive pregnancy test.
We decided to get married, which was a little difficult considering I was in-processing to my unit and he was getting ready to deploy with his. Thanks to Google, I found out the state of Texas does marriage by proxy. After a couple weeks of faxing and Fed-Exing, I got a phone call from my new husband telling me we were now married. He left for Afghanistan a month after that, and we didn’t see each other again until the end of December, after I was out of the Army and back in the states, and our daughter Adela was born. He was home for fifteen days, and the last time I saw him was January 11, 2009, watching him board a plane while I held our two week old baby girl.
I wake up to a sleepy little face that looks just like my husband’s sleepy face every single morning. Our baby usually ends up in bed with me since I don’t like sleeping alone, and it’s a lot easier to get her back to sleep at 4 in the morning if she’s already lying there next to me. She kicks at my ribs and claws at my face until I finally get up and we start our morning: diaper change, cereal, bottle, play time. Once she’s fed and happy, I check my e-mail. It doesn’t matter what it says – he could ask me about a withdrawal from our checking account or he could tell me how much he loves and misses me – I just want to hear from him.
My laptop and cell phone have become extensions of my arms at this point. I know what times to expect him to be online, I know which places in our house don’t get the best signal; there’s nothing worse than waiting all day to talk to someone you love, just to get an email time-stamped an hour earlier that says “GET ONLINE,” or hear your voicemail go off when your phone didn’t even ring because it was sitting in your living room where you don’t get service. Sometimes I’m embarrassed of the way I constantly leave my computer on with the volume at it’s highest so I can hear an instant message anywhere in our house, or how I carry our daughter in one hand and my phone in the other. But in reality these are the only two connections I have to my husband right now, and I miss him.
Around noon, I start waiting to hear an IM pop-up. Once it does, I pick up Adela and she sits on my lap while I talk to her dad. I put up videos of her on YouTube so he can see what we do during the day and how much she’s changing. In five months, I’ve taken 297 of them. I also post pictures onto my Flickr account, which used to be for photographs that I took as a hobby, but now holds 2,839 pictures of our daughter. I hate that he’s not here with his first child to experience all the little things I get to see every day, and the least I can do is take videos and pictures of everything – naps, baths, rolling over, trying to crawl, babbling, crying, playing with her toys, eating solid foods for the first time, laughing at me making stupid noises, whatever. I’m grateful that we live in a time where I can do this, because I can’t imagine what it must have been like before the internet, when men had to leave their pregnant wives and come back to a child they didn’t even know.
William gets about a half an hour on the phone and tries to call whenever he can. I’ll put the phone to Adela and he’ll say hi to her and she’ll coo back at him, or she’ll just look confused because she doesn’t know where his voice is coming from. We talk about her, mostly, or what we’re looking forward to doing once he comes home. I whine at least once every conversation: “Come hoooome, I miss you,” and he tells me, “Soon.”
Once his half hour is up and he has to go, the rest of the day is just trying to pass the time. Adela naps, I read. We go shopping a lot. Texas is very different from New York and I feel completely out of place. I don’t know anyone here and to be honest, I haven’t made any effort to meet people. My whole life now revolves around my deployed husband and our six-month old baby, and I feel like the least interesting person in the world. I know that there are countless young women going through the same thing as I am, but the idea of spending time with someone just to cry over how much we miss our men and talk about what our babies are doing doesn’t seem all that appealing. I’m sure this isn’t good for my psyche, but so far I’ve done alright.
Finally this deployment is over, and right now my husband is on his way home to me. Adela and I made him a Welcome Home sign out of finger paints and we both got new dresses to wear when we go to pick him up. I have the dinner I’m going to make him all planned out and his Father’s Day present is sitting on our dining room table. The first night he’s home we’re going to lie in bed with our baby in-between us and he’s going to get to see her smile and laugh and squeal for the first time. I’m going to sleep soundly for the first time in fifteen months because finally our life as a family can begin.
Jaclyn
