Long-distance marriage

We're almost midway through Bill's tour of duty. This is usually the point where I have adjusted to him being gone, where I am fully into the swing of activities that define my "woman alone" life, as opposed to my "wifely" life. I eat whatever I want and whenever I feel like it. I sleep on my own schedule. I do what I please, go where I want, run my own life without consultation with or consideration of another. Yes, it's really all about me right now, but I'm not entirely comfortable with it this time.

For many years when the kids were growing up, his schedule was 10 weeks home and 10 weeks away working. It would take about 3 weeks for everyone to settle down into the new routine when he left, and about 3 weeks more to adjust when he came home. Sometimes it was really hard. We worried about how it affected the kids, if they felt abandoned, or how I was by necessity always relegated to the status of disciplinarian parent, while Bill always got to be the indulgent dad, coming home with presents and no ongoing issues. We rationalized it by thinking that most dads only get to see their children for a few hours at night before bedtime, while Bill got to be a full-time dad on his 2 1/2 month vacations. In the end though, we weren't going to change our weird lifestyle. It was just what we did and how we lived.

I'm sure some people in our insular rural community suspected that the very existence of Bill was a myth, a pretend story to cover up some unimaginable tale of immorality or depravity. There were hints of that kind of gossip, that insidious fuel of small-town life. If anything, the kids were mortified at times that we were a committed couple, still married to each other, as if that made them objects of curiosity and derision in a population where multiple divorces and unmarried parenting was unfortunately all too common. I was dismayed about the local culture, seeing betrayed wives excoriating faithless husbands and their new floozy girlfriends in the local paper, and large families of siblings, each with a different father.

"Why can't you two just be normal?" I remember teenaged Juli wailing. "Why can't I just go live with my father on the weekends?"

Somehow we worked it out, I don't remember how. Some years I thought I simply couldn't do it anymore, that in order for our marriage to survive, Bill would have to find some other way of making a living, I would have to give up being a stay-at-home mom with part-time jobs and we would become a struggling two-career household instead. Other years, we just lived in 10-week chunks without thinking about it. Then sometime in the late 1990s, I just decided to stop mourning the loss of a "normal" life and embrace the opportunity that gave me a chance to live two different lives simultaneously.

About that time, I became the object of envy in my circle of friends. "I wish my husband would go away for 3 months so I could learn to like him again," one woman confided. "After 25 years, he's getting on my nerves!"

It's true. If we had to be around each other continually, we probably would get fed up with each other's idiosyncracies. He gets impatient and stubborn. I get obsessive and have an extremely short attention-span. Luckily, I am also blessed with a selective short memory and general optimism, so every time he comes home, we get to begin again. It doesn't matter what arguments we had before he left, because I've already forgotten them. The excitement of the reunion and the strangeness of being around each other again after a long absence means we get to redefine the parameters of our interactions. There are many years of shared memories, but plenty of new information to share for the first time. It keeps me interested, because we've changed and yet, the bedrock of respect for and loyalty to each other in the relationship is still the same.

Of course, it's different now too, without the company of our kids to keep me interested and engaged. It is lonely at times, and I miss the dynamic of the family life, even with the inevitable drama and emotional uproar of all those personalities trying to coexist. But mostly, I miss my partner, for all his qualities and faults. We may be halfway through his absence, but I haven't found my rhythm yet, and I'm still fussing and fighting it.