At the end of my last post, my husband and I were hours away from leaving for our long awaited honeymoon. As excited as I was, I also felt a little nervous. We have been together almost 12 years, so it wasn’t like a first date kind of nervous, but more like a "I cannot remember the last time I spent this much time alone with my husband” kind of nervous.
I guess I worried that I might be a little boring.
With so much time apart between work ups, deployments, trainings and schools, I cannot remember the last time we spent a week together that didn’t involve a PCS or having a baby. So without those distractions, what will we do? What will we talk about without two toddlers screaming and throwing food at each other?
A beach vacation is a dream for me. I am perfectly content sitting on the beach in silence with no plans for my day but my husband, on the other hand, is not a sit down on the beach kind of guy. Especially after a couple of deployments to the desert. Can we make it work? And with no kids and work to go to, we have no restrictions. What will we do?
Our big weekend plans usually consists of making popcorn with our 3-year-old and watching a Disney movie while we play catch up from the week and talk about work and the funny things the kids did lately. Sometimes we sneak in a glass of wine. Or if we are really daring, we add in a little fancy cheese plate. I can’t believe I am finally going to be kid free and I am nervous to hang out with my husband. I hope he still likes me!
So our dream vacation came and went. It actually started with both my husband and I getting food poisoning hours before our flight left so I thought for sure our vacation was doomed to be terrible. Somehow it was a quick illness and we both recovered by the time we left the country.
Despite the way it started and all my worries, it was much easier to relax then I thought it would be. I knew the boys were in great hands and could reach us if they needed to. The best part was, I realized my husband and I still have the strong foundation that has kept us going all this time.
Our friendship and marriage were much stronger than I thought. We were finally able to put aside our other roles in life at work and as parents and focus on what we had before the military and our kids, each other. We survived deployments, being apart during the births of our sons and move after move after move as well as so many days and months apart. How did I ever worry we would have nothing to talk about?
We had so much to talk about! We laughed and reminisced about the past and made plans for our future. Some mornings we just sat at the pool and held hands while we both read our own books. At one time, I may have been worried about that silence between us but something about it was comforting.
We went sightseeing and jammed packed the other day with tours that kept us busy. We dressed up, had romantic candlelight dinners. It was amazing. But despite how amazing this dream vacation was, I realized how much I love our life - our family and the everyday chaos.
Don’t get me wrong. I would go back on vacation in a heartbeat. But now that I know we still can be that fun, married couple, I like being the old, married couple. I think I am finally done with trying to count our moves and add up all our time apart. It doesn’t matter how many days we are apart in this military life, all that matters is what we have when we are together.
