Everyone has disappointments in life. My method of coping with them is to try to make those cliches stick: Everything happens for a reason. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In my mind, we are defined by our failures only in that it either sets you on a different path, or makes you so determined to make things happen that nothing can stand in your way. Some circumstances don’t give you that choice, though, it’s just that one way is no longer an option. And all those platitudes don’t make it suck any less.
Tomorrow we are making a trip to a place that dh and I would just as soon never see again. The setting for one of those failures, if you will. We have dear friends that have moved back there, true military friends of the rarest kind (the only reason I would ever go back to that hole in the ground). My dh would rather not go at all, but he thought maybe we should just get it over with. To make matters worse, they succeeded where we had failed. So while we love them, (and they try not to talk about it) it is torture for my dh to hear about a life that he once wanted. In my typical style, I hear about it and try to emphasize why that was not the right life for us. I would not trade if given the chance, whereas I think my dh would. It’s one of those hooah machismo things, I think.
I’m hoping the years will have healed some of that old wound for him. What I’m worried about is that it will be reopened. My tough soldier has a very tender heart, I’m afraid.
I totally understand that one. My husband’s career, although it looks perfectly fine from the outside, has been a series of failures to him. He’s a navigator, not a pilot. He didn’t get selected for school. None of the big decisions seem to go his way. But he has a closet full of big awards to show for it all.
I tend to look at it the way you do. And in the last few years as our life’s priorities have changed, so does he. Now he’s happy to make Lt Col and retire as long as the kids and I are happy. But he has low expectations for most things because the truth is that when the chips are down, he always gets screwed.