Hmmm. This is becoming a trend.

I did it. I emailed her.

I’m so glad I did. It turns out she recently became engaged (!) I can’t describe exactly how it felt to read that email. A strange mixture of shock and relief… of the guilt I’ve been carrying around for the past few years but also of happiness for her. It felt like the chapter of her life (the one that included me, and the Army) completely came to a close. I remember having so many conversations about life, and our futures when we lived next door to each other. We had thought we would be traveling down the same path.

How very different life has turned out.

So now that’s 2 people (the other being my very own mom) who I never would’ve expected getting engaged. They say it comes in threes, anybody else?

No really, I’m fine.

We survived our weekend. The dutchkid was a perfect angel for the long day of driving. Our friends are doing well, and it was very good to see them. Sitting around, talking about some old times. I love it when you just pick up right where you left off, even if it has been a year or more since you’ve seen each other face to face. Dh and I even had some quality conversation in the car on the way home, which was nice. It seems so often that we spend our lives talking about the day-to-day nonsense of life.

On our way home, we decided to eat at a hole in the wall Mexican restaurant we used to frequent. It hasn’t changed a bit. I was just congratulating myself that I had managed to just enjoy the day without walking too far down memory lane. Then I remembered: the last time we ate at that restaurant was with a couple who we lost touch with long ago. C. was killed in Afghanistan, and afterwards my friendship with his wife was never the same. Our friendship had started disintegrating before that happened, my dh’s “failure” had changed things (or maybe just changed me)… but I don’t know that I’ll ever recover from the guilt of having my dh alive while hers was dead. We had struggled through infertility together, trying to cope with the stress of fertility treatments around deployments. I was newly pregnant at his funeral.

We kept in contact for several months after that, but by the time the dutchkid was born the phone calls had stopped. I often try to rationalize my reluctance to call her or even email by telling myself that if I were in her situation, I wouldn’t want to talk to me. I don’t want to torture her by trying to assuage my own guilt. I might have to try again one last time. Just to tell her we were there. How I remembered us laughing about the “mystery meat” tacos. How I remembered her and I sitting there as our dh’s joked with the waiters in Spanish. How I remembered him.

Detaching

I was talking to another military spouse the other day and it turns out we are both due for moves around the same time. She mentioned that she can already feel herself pulling back from being involved in things here. She said it makes her sad when they move, that the people you’ve left behind “Forget all about you. For awhile they call and keep in touch but then they just sort of fade away.”

While I recognized immediately the feeling of detachment, the sadness was a little bit lost on me. I enjoy the moving for the most part. It has its painful moments, no doubt, but I enjoy discovering a new community. It’s also my “get out of jail free card”. I guess I tend to look at everything as very temporary. If I don’t like my job, or have an awful neighbor, it’s nice to know that I’m not dealing with that forever. Sometimes I think it would be more difficult to live somewhere and look into an endless future.

I’ve never thought about the aspect of friends left behind moving on without me. Maybe my roots don’t go down deep enough, maybe I’m too detached? This applies more to civilian friends than military ones. For us, good military friends may be hard to find, but once you have them you can track them down wherever they might be (and they’ll do the same for you). I have civilian friends who I do keep in touch with from various posts we’ve been at, but they are few and far between.

I guess it’s a combination of my personality (I’m an introvert anyway) and my defense mechanisms. I have found that friendships can be tough because sometimes civilian folks don’t quite “get it” about military life. My dh finds the endless explanations frustrating at times. I don’t really mind that part, but comments about how my dh should “just get out” or “I can’t believe he would leave you so much,” do irritate me. This is our choice, so please don’t presume that because the life of a military family isn’t for you that it shouldn’t be for us.

I should have asked her how long she has been a military spouse, maybe I’ve grown cynical over the years.