My husband serves on a submarine in the United States Navy.  He’s been in the service since 1998 and we married in 1999 so I’ve been along for the whole journey.  We are getting ready to move again, our tenth move since we’ve been married and had been given verbal orders to head to Omaha.  He is deployed right now and yesterday our youngest daughter and I were out for a mommy daughter date and I checked me email and their is a message from our Detailer (the guy who decides where we go next) that we are headed to Germany.  My first reaction was disbelief and WHAT??  Germany??  We had talked about doing an overseas billet but this came out of no where.  I find as I get older the thought of moving is getting harder and harder to process.  Having four kids to move around with us also makes it a little more complicated, now having to worry about schools and their emotions surrounding the whole thing.

Life in the submarine community differs from other parts of the military for many reasons. One of the differences is communication while they are deployed.  You always see those videos and commercials online with families skyping with their deployed spouse or loved one or even getting an phone call while they are gone.  That is not the case for submarines.  He’s been gone for almost four months now and we’ve had communication with them for about three or four weeks of this whole patrol and by communication I mean email and not all of them always get through.  We’ve learned to number our emails so we know which one don’t make it and I can send them in a mail drop (if we have them).  Anyways, my point of sharing this information is when things like orders being changing or any major event there is no way to discuss it with them.  It’s more of “here’s what is happening, figure it out.”  I was in shock.  It’s exciting but a huge change.  I wrote hubby an email explaining what was going on, knowing I’m not going to get a response but he should know.  I went and pulled the kids out of school a little early to see what they thought and it came with mixed emotions,  two were excited, one was crying and one was too young to know any different.  It didn’t help that our move date had already been changed three times and we were expecting to stay put for another year and now we are leaving in four months.

Last night I’m pretty sure I had my first panic attack.  After getting all of the kids in bed, one of which was in my bed because she is running a fever and coughing I was so emotionally spent that I just wanted to go to sleep.  I’m laying down and my heart is racing thinking about all of the possibilities of things that can go wrong.  We are going to have to fly on a plane for 12 hours with four kids and what is the plane crashes and we all die.  What is we get there and someone kidnaps on the kids or we are killed by some crazy extremist group.  Oh and wait my husband has been floating around at the bottom of the ocean in a big metal tube for the last four months with a bunch of nuclear missiles, what if it gets a leak or someone messes up on watch and the boat sinks.  Nothing stressful right?  I’m just loosing my mind.  It probably wasn’t the best time to write an email to him.  I’m sending a followup today so he doesn’t think I’ve lost my mind.

When it comes down to it, we don’t have control of so much of our life.  We trudge on hoping and praying things work out and sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.  We’ve had our fair share of heartache, pain and moments of great joy but, isn’t that what life is about.  To praise God and be thankful in the moments of joy and also in the dark moments and times we feel like we just can’t do it anymore.  I tend to bottle things up and just keep moving forward because I’m afraid if I stop it will all fall apart.  This is good and bad.  I get a lot done and I manage to keep life running with four kids, being a military spouse and attempting to work a part time job (although sometimes not so smoothly).  But I have breaking points that come and it seems to hit me like a flood.

I believe that God gives us trials to build our character and to be able to witness to others through what we have learned. Sometimes I wish those trials weren’t so often but it reminds me I can’t do this on my own and I don’t know the day or the hour that will be my last on this earthly world and I need to trust in God and live each day as though it may be my last.  Don’t sweat the small stuff, I will probably continue to be late for all my kids sporting events (but we are always their before the game starts), my house will never be consistently clean but I have happy, mostly healthy kids and their is a heavenly father who is their to catch me, pick me up when I stumble like last night when I have those I can’t do this anymore moments.  Today the sun will rise and set and tomorrow will come.  What I choose to do the middle time is up to me.