Small Victories

One week down, however many to go. I'm not gonna' count right now because it might just be depressing. So, for now, I'm going to take it one week at a time, and I'm going to claim small victories where I can:

1. I got both kids up, dressed, and was NOT late to work this week. In fact, on two days I was much earlier than I have been in a long time.

2. I got out of the house before 7 o'clock on 4 out of the five days. On the fifth day, Friday, I was out of the house at 7:04. Not too shabby.

3. I didn't cry. I'm not making any guarantees about the week ahead, though.

I was probably working on short-term adrenaline this past week. I have been apart from MWW before, for as long as a week, so this part of our separation wasn't really a challenge (you know, except for the two small children thing). In fact, I think if someone examined our "couple dynamics" from the pre-children six years of our marraige, he/she would find that we were able to be very independent of each other when needed, but definitely worked better together. Some couples have never spent a night apart from each other; while it was not so very common for us, it also wasn't a rarity. When I took a Marriage and the Family class in college, I remember them talking about "A-frame" and "H-frame" couples--we are the latter. (The A is an image of two people leaning on each other so that if one were to leave, the other would fall over, holding on to each other, but for survival. The H is an image of two people standing on their own and holding on to each other, still independent, but intertwined.)

One thing that was weird this week was telephone conversations. Nothing much happened here. A couple of cute Goldilocks stories, sure, but really, we were just going through the grind. MWW was busy with Army-related stuff. Every time we talked we were both exhausted and the dialogue seemed stilted. It's frustrating that I don't know any of the people in his stories (I'm a visual person--I want to visualize faces..), and predictable that most of the military side of this adventure is not very interesting to me. The lawyering side of it is, and stories about how the (desk-job) lawyers are dealing with the military (crawling through the mud) side of things are definitely entertaining.

I hope that once the indoctrination phase is over and the JAG school phase starts, that maybe things will be less awkward? We'll see..