The Preschooler Gets It

I knew that it would take my strong-willed five year-old the longest to understand. He knew Daddy was leaving for a long time, but he didn’t truly understand how long that was. Not really. The measurement of time is still shrouded in eerie mystery. My boy sleeps so hard that he wakes up and asks, “is it day or night?”

Can you remember that? Can you remember when hours, days, and months were inconsequential? Because I’ve tried, and I can’t. I’ve clearly been an adult too long.

Now, in the past I’ve mentioned the existence of our well intentioned but psycho-killeresque shrine. This is the one we erected after the visual impact of 360 or so days was just too exhausting to bear. We moved instead to a monthly system of marking time … the symbolic lighting of twelve candles. Everyone in my house loves fire.  Perched on the side of the shrine, symbolizing the triumphant return of our Hero, is a pile of Husband’s valuables not permitted to accompany him on his exotic vacation this year: Navy Wings (he doesn’t need them on his NARMY uniform), a flight suit name patch, the Breitling watch I got him one year, and his wedding ring.

These are pretty neat candles, each one bearing a little silver word placard on the front. Husband bought them for me on my 39th birthday and I never lit them. Of course, the candle we picked for the month of February was “Love.” So on Valentine’s Day we lit the Candle of Luv and The Preschooler asked when Daddy was coming home. I pointed to a candle midway down the row and said matter-of-factly, “here’s where Daddy comes for a visit.” Then I pointed down to the end of the row at the pile of Husband’s familiar things and said plainly, “and here’s where Daddy comes all the way home.”

We had been lighting the candles periodically, but not daily. The Preschooler had finally caught on that we couldn’t light the next one until an entire month had passed. He was slowly understanding what that period of time felt like. I could see he was doing advanced candle trinomials in his head. His eyes fell on each candle one-by-one, and as he looked down the row and paused on each one, together in silence our memories were sparked.

• Halloween. He dressed as a Ninja and got an email account so Daddy could email him.
• Veteran’s Day, and the explanation of the White Table.
• Thanksgiving, when we had our little meal with Nana and watched football rather quietly.
• Christmas: getting a tree, singing at church, sending Daddy’s presents in the mail.
• January, and the impromptu but brave trip to the ER.

And then I watched him turn his gaze to the long stack of candles yet to be lit.  He looked at candles but I looked at St. Patrick’s day, Easter, and his sixth birthday. He saw blue and pink wax and I saw summer come and go. He looked at the silver plates with words he couldn’t read … words like “longevity” and “peace” and I saw the colors change, and his first day of Kindergarten. I watched his eyes fill with water that billowed up and held steady, right at the dam’s edge of his little eyelashes. And my heart broke in two, right there. It was hitting him in waves. He was realizing how long a month was. He was realizing how long a year was. He was realizing what deployment meant. He could see it for the first time.

But then, The Preschooler didn’t respond as I expected. He didn’t scream or bawl. He didn’t say, “but that’s a LONG TIME!” or get angry and punch something. Or jump on something. Or break something. These were the reactions I was betting on. These were the outbursts I was prepared for. Something big, something dramatic, something violent and boy-like. Instead, he was silent and lifeless, his arms dangling and his back slouched. I recognized the absolute resignation and my  heart broke some more. And then right there on the bathroom floor, he put his face in his hands, let his back fall against the cabinet, and slowly slunk down into a ball, collapsing in a heap. He started to sob.

I wondered how he knew that I secretly cried this way when he and his sister weren’t looking.

I didn’t scoop him up. I just got down on the bathroom floor next to him and held him there for a minute. I thought about the night before Husband left, and what I wanted to hear. I thought about what Husband said, and I repeated parts of it in The Preschooler’s ear, trying hard not to show the breaks and cracks in my own voice:

I’m so proud of you. I know you will be strong. The time will pass quickly sometimes and slowly other times, but at the end of the year it will be the best of homecomings. Daddy misses us, too, so much. He thinks of us every day and he will keep thinking of us. He won’t forget you and you won’t forget him. We will talk whenever we can and we will keep telling him what we are doing. We will keep praying for him until he comes home.

It was silent, and I was happy with my response. And then he asked the question. The Question.

Through tears he turned and looked at me: “How do we know Daddy will not get killed?”

My responsive silence was not awe-inspiring. I had applied diversion tactics to questions about the “bad guys” and why Daddy was carrying a gun in his pictures. I had successfully avoided international politics and news shows during the dinner hour. I had even described Daddy’s abode as a “hotel room” or a “camping tent.” But this was a very pointed question. He was asking me to make a promise I could not make. And he was asking the question that had been nagging at me for months. How, indeed.

I had to hug him tight, because I couldn’t look him in the eyes and say it. But for the first time, for him, I believed the answer to the question.

“Well, everybody dies baby. From the day we are born, we are one step closer to the day God calls us to Heaven. Daddy isn’t any more likely to die today than you or me walking down the street. We aren’t in control of our lifetimes and you know what? Wherever we happen to be or whatever we happen to be doing doesn’t change when that day comes. Only God knows. So where Daddy is and what he’s doing doesn’t mean he’s going to get killed or not get killed just like it means nothing for you or me. Daddy is in a safe place, just like you, because it’s where he is supposed to be in that moment. And no matter what happens, Daddy will be taken care of, and you will be taken care of.”

The Preschooler got it. And I got it, too.

We snuggled lots that evening after blowing the candle out, and the two of us stayed awake in the bed long after Sweet Pea fell asleep. It was good to have safety and arms around each other. We were working through it together. He asked the question again several times, and I gave the same response. He wanted to hear the answer again, and I wanted to say it out loud again. The more I said it, the more true it became.

So I guess it took me a while. In fact, it took me as long as it took The Preschooler. But there it is. Finally. Acceptance.

And now, we can move on …

Affection Deficit Disorder

There have been telltale signs.

I’ve been hugging all of my friends lately. All of them. A hug hello, and then a hug goodbye. I know when I leave they look at each other and say, “well hello Sister Huggy-Bear.” To make matters worse, I’ve become a weirdo at work, too. Nothing too inappropriate because, you know, I have to defend sexual harassment claims for crying out loud. But a pat on the shoulder or back seems to have become my uniform response at the end of an office chatter break. Worse, I’ve managed to execute an unsuspecting double-hand shake here and there. That’s right. I’ve involuntarily become the two-handed hand shaker. I no longer shake hands. I encompass and cradle.

This grosses me out.

And it’s not just my friends and co-workers.  Today I absolutely smothered my children with affection like a needy – I don’t know – MOM. I wrapped my arms around them both at once and squeezed them and tickled them. I wrestled with them. I held them on my lap and I rocked and I brushed back their hair. I adjusted their clothing and walked alongside them with my arm around their shoulders. I held their hands and squeezed “I love you” and picked up The Preschooler on the stairs. I snuggled. I nuzzled. I – I – I even kissed them – on the lips.

So it’s obviously happening. If you do the math, it’s about right. On New Year’s Eve Husband’s absence officially made it into the triple digits. And now, at 100 days without him, the effects are starting to show.

I’m officially approaching the condition known as Affection Deficit Disorder.

The irony in this lies in the increasing number of experiences and concepts that “touch” me on a daily basis. The absence of Husband’s physical touch seems to have hyper-sensitized the other impact receptacles. For example, for dinner I ate the tiniest portion of whole wheat angel-hair pasta with ground turkey and marinara sauce. This was not a dish of carb-loaded salty sausage goodness. This is the brown grainy kind of goodness that passes for pasta and cooks up hard or mushy, but nowhere in between. This is the ground meat that starts out pink but cooks up white and sticks to the pan because it has no natural oils. Yet a fork-full entering my mouth was like a warm slow melt on my tongue that doused my thoughts for just a moment before bursting into tangy tomatoeyness. I stopped to sense every flavor change and it felt … satisfying. Sweet Pea even mimicked me at dinner. “Mmmmmmmm.” Can spaghetti really be meaningful?

Perhaps it’s like the body’s natural reaction to a disability. Our bodies compensate. The blind have a heightened sense of hearing. Those with hearing loss become master interpreters of body and facial expression. So I guess it makes sense that a loss of physical touch would lead to an amplification of emotional touch.

Confirmation that this phenomenon had officially arrived was solidified for me this weekend. It happened late at night. We were all piled in “the big bed” and the kids were long since asleep. I was checking emails on my I-device and trying not to wake them. I am addicted to these gadgets. Husband would call it “geeking out” one last time before bed. With a blue LED hue cast across my face in the blackened room, I scanned the list and saw a message from Husband. I nervously clicked on it with shaky but excited precision, ready to gobble up the words.

Lots of half-sentences and exclamation points littered the screen, but I didn’t care. Husband is not a wordsmith, and what he lacks in eloquence he makes up for in honesty. And right there, in the middle of one sentence, I saw it:

“Have been a bit sad during this season …”

Sad. He said “sad.” That shocked me. Husband doesn’t get sad. He gets “challenged” or he anticipates regret. He is built to warrior his way through things. He looks for the solution, the correction, the next step toward positive progress, or the lesson to be identified in order to avoid “the situation” in the future. This is why he is my guide. This is why I’m the one that gets “sad” and he’s the one that fixes it.

So this one little word, these three letters, they flooded my emotional touch receptors as if he had described some great grief in excruciating detail. But it was just a word: “sad.” It wasn’t even a particularly descriptive word for an emotion.

Almost as if it were a nostalgic photo, I felt transported back 100 days prior to that very spot. I was huddled in the dark in the same divot on our bed. It was two nights before his departure, and we laid there in silence. I was thinking about loneliness. My face was wet, and his arm was under me. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t speak. I just cried and covered my face with my hands. I remembered that he had used that word then, too. As if my tears had created something that required a response, he had whispered:

“I’m sad, too.”

The sentiment touched me again now. And there in the dark I reached out to hold a sleeping child’s hand where my husband had been before, and I pressed my I-device to my heart, and I let it go over that one silly little phrase. Predictably my nose quickly plugged and my upper lip swelled and my eyes burned. I eventually opened my eyes and wiped the tears and sat up so I could breathe. I tapped out a response that was less guarded than it should have been. And as I proofread it, I saw my own simple words staring back at me:

“I’m sad, too.”

It turns out that really is the best word to describe these feelings, after all. There are so many other words that just don’t apply. I am not fearful. I am not defeated. I am not extinguished. I really am just sad sometimes.

I was left thinking about that simplicity, and how different it could be with a different history, different friends. Even visually, the word is short. Just like this season. This mobilization remains above all else a temporary condition, and in truth, it hasn’t been all bad. It has seeded new ideas in my mind about what I am truly capable of doing, it has grown my affection for being appreciative of what I have, and it has required me to tap into parts of my imagination and memory that I have been ignoring for a long time. I’ll admit, it hurt to sit in the dark and cry with a cold blue mobile screen held to my chest. But I’m ready. I’m ready for the internal touch receptors to engage during this phase. Because it’s all temporary. It is.

And clearly, I’ll be eating a bunch more of that whole grain pasta.