My husband has been home for 6 weeks,
and in 2.5 weeks he will be leaving again, c'est la vie. After a year of being away
from home, the 6 weeks he has been home for have gone by at whirlwind
speed. We have been so busy that it has taken me a little while to
realize just how much we were dealing with this time last year when trying to
do all we needed to on opposite sides of the world...both expats in
the countries we were living in...tasks like banking or renewing
insurance are not always as simple as you would think.
Looking back on spending our first year of marriage on opposite sides of the world it seems a haze...probably
because it was.
Trying to decide on re-homing or
possibly euthanizing animals, packing up a house in a country you
only relocated to a year before, moving across the world where it
would take 3 days of travel to see family should any emergency
occur.....its a decision that is particularly personal.
For the non-animal lovers its a simple
'why wouldn't you?!', on the swing side are the animal lovers who
will say 'how could you even think of that – I would leave my
husband before putting an animal to sleep!!!'.
For the people trying to escape their
reality come the 'OMG Fiji – who wouldnt want to move Fiji!?'. For
the people who are heavily rooted where they live comes 'Wow, I don't
know that I could move so far away from my friends and family like
that'.
Then come the work related comments
'well why cant he just get a job in Europe?' or 'surely that's not
your only option' or better still 'why doesn't your husband just stop
being a pilot and do something else?'.
Personal decisions are just that –
personal...and so I found myself in a haze – locked in my own
little bubble of trying to figure things out. I socialized little,
took my dogs for long walks, and spent hours on Skype to my husband
trying to figure out what the right answer was.
There were days of tears, days of hope,
days of desperation – every option seemed to lead to a path of
heartache. Days turned into weeks, then months – all a blur.
Looking back I realize that I learnt a
lot in those 12 months, about myself, my marriage, my friendships –
and in some strange way it was possibly one of the most intensely
difficult and yet rewarding times of my life. When you know how much
adversity you can face with any person, partner, friend, or family –
there is enormous solace and gratitude to be found in that.
Everyone faces challenges, some are
big, some are small, some are daily, and some are once in a lifetime.
And when the battle is over and so much has changed, so much of
ourselves has changed (some good, some bad) – that we cannot go
back to what we were before....that's ok, because we are all just
trying to survive this glorious, messy, beautiful thing called
'life'.
