Deployments are Like Pregnancies...

I sent this to Hubster towards the end of the last deployment. I came across it this afternoon when I was looking at the old emails from him that I had received while he was gone. I kept every single one of the emails that he sent to me.

This has been the longest 10 months of my life. I am starting to think of this as kinda like being pregnant.

You suffer for the first few months with sickness. ( You wake up every morning with your stomach churning. Hoping that you don't get a knock on your door from a person in a dress uniform. Looking at every car that might happen to stop or slow down in front of your house and praying that it is not somebody from the military. )

Then you have your second trimester where you start to feel the movement of the baby and you don't have that sickness anymore. ( You have learned at this point not to worry as much about that car that has stopped. You still have that worry in the back of your mind, but you pray every day that the Lord will keep him safe for you. It is about this time that you hit the half way point. This is when the baby moves. You realize that their really is something there. That it won't be long until you see them again. That you have made it through what is supposedly the worst part.)

Then you hit that final trimester. Oh the excitement of finally getting to see the face of who you have been carrying under your heart for this long. There is still some pain and agony involved. The anticipation of the delivery. The delivery that keeps getting moved back. By the time that you have reached the 9 month stage you just want it to be over. You are so tired. Every little thing that can go wrong probably will during this time. ( This is when you start to get to the nitty gritty. It becomes hard for you to focus. All you want to think about is the end. You are tired. You are stressed. This is the hardest part of all. This is the longest 3 months of your life. You just want them to be over. You want to see the end result. )

Then you finally make it to delivery. The labor is not easy, but the rewards of finally seeing your child are worth it. ( I feel that we are in the delivery stage about now. This portion of the deployment is not easy. There is still going to be alot of pushing, but in the end it will all be worth it. Just as you think that you have finally made it to the end, something happens to make it get pushed back. But when we make it to that final step, the step of actually seeing each other again, it will be worth it. The pain and loneliness will just vanish. All we will think about is how wonderful it is to be in each others arms again.)