Past Perfect

I just finished watching a couple hours worth of video from when Elsbeth was a baby and in doing so I felt the sharp pangs of an unidentifiable emotion. That was a bittersweet time for me because in one sense everything was so easy; I was living at my parents house in my old bedroom and had no domestic responsibilities except caring for Ellie and working out. But on the other hand it was a difficult time for me. My Husband was halfway around the world in a war zone, communication with him was limited, and I was living in a sort of limbo between the reality I was experiencing and the reality that awaited me at my home in Mississippi.

It was only two years ago, but in that time so much has changed. Not only with us but with the course of the world itself. The wave of excess Americans had been living had crested and we all seemed unaware of what was about to happen next. In all of the videos there is the presence of my Father's voice because at the time he wasn't working; he liked to say he was retired. We were constant companions and content to be so. A far cry from the relationship we shared in my teenage years. Now his Denali has been traded in for a Kia and he leaves for work every morning, albeit still whistling most of the time.

Since then so much has changed in me; in our lives. My husband returned safely and we resumed our lives picking up where we left off as if the hiccup of deployment had never happened. But you can't go to war and not be changed. Sometimes we talk about the things that affected him: sending boys off to fight knowing that some would never return. What a bomb sounds like exploding in the dessert. These are things I'll never know.

We moved from a house that like so many others we were unable to sell due to it's loss in value. We found a new home in the capitol and had another baby. How easy it is to sum up the course of some years in a few words when the truth and the reality are written in the lines on our faces and the miles on our souls. It's not a bad thing. It's just a thing. And it happens to us all. I struggle to grasp the depth of this experience that seems to be speeding past me.

Now, once again, I am losing my Husband although it's not a war that separates us, but a goal. To finish two more years of school. I vow not to be a detriment or a hindrance and so I think that the best course for us is once again for me to find myself with my children at my parents. Not for the entire time, but for extended periods of time. As I struggle to put a name to what I feel about the past; I chart a course for the future. It is a future of uncertainty in uncertain times but as it always has, my faith will carry me through and I will draw upon the strength of my family.