Or so I thought. The thing no one tells you about marriage is that its truths are slippery.
When the war in Afghanistan ended and we transitioned into a more routine family life, I had missed Andrew for so long that the missing had begun to run dry. I realized that I had felt abandoned for years, maybe ever since he had made that stark declaration in the therapist’s office. And he had missed so much at home, he wasn’t sure where his place was. I wanted him to find it, though.
Luckily, he did. He was ravenous for time with me and the children, hungry for the certainty and comfort of home life, cooking us elaborate meals, taking the children on Saturday adventures, reading every email from the school before I even had a chance. He had always loved us fiercely, and had been an excellent father, but now his center of gravity was inside our home, and when he left on trainings, the invisible threads that connected us as a family felt tightly woven in a new way.
There had been times, in his many absences, that I had felt like we were living a facsimile of a marriage, trading the ocean for the faint sound of it through the spiral of a seashell. But now, finally, we had the real thing. We had the ocean.
Two years passed without a deployment. Then, one night, Andrew and I went out to a steak dinner, a rare occasion. We were drinking cocktails and smiling dopily at each other when Andrew’s phone rang. I heard his voice change, and I knew. When he hung up, I waited for the faint but detectable shift in his body language, the tension in his jaw, the new distance in his normally soft and attentive gaze.
My husband is expert at compartmentalization, able to switch from dinner out to packing for a deployment with a startling quickness, leaving, in some sense, before we’ve even had the chance to say goodbye. But he surprised me this time: When he laid his hand over mine on the white tablecloth, I could sense a pull toward home that was greater than his pull away.
