Shawn Davis Writes

This dog will not be left behind.  

We move a lot.  Quite a lot.  We’ve been in our current house for just over three years, which is a record for us.  We’ve lived places for as little as four months, but rarely do we surpass the two-and-a-half year point.  We’ve got itchy feet.

And every time we move I tell myself, “I am never going to do this again!  This is ridiculous!”  Five months after we move, I start looking for the next place I want my husband to shoot for.  Intellectually I know I do this.  Emotionally I am quite sure that I mean it this time, I WILL NOT MOVE AGAIN.

Whatever.   I say that about painting, too.  But let Glidden come out with a new color palette…

We’re moving again.  This time very far.

In an effort to save money and put my best foot forward, I packed our house up myself.  I found a renter myself.  I am even cleaning the darn thing myself.

Isn’t the inside of this fridge glorious?

And yet, it’s down to two days before liftoff and I’m up at one in the morning writing a blog post (when I’ve been very lax about such writing recently) instead of sleeping.  Why? Because I’m crazy.  Also because I’m an insomniac.  And Crazy + Insomnia + House Inspection (our municipality requires them for anyone renting their house out – I agree with these people on that subject) = My Brain Won’t Stop Talking to Me.

Go to sleep, Brain!  Now!

My brain listens about as well as my toddler children did.  It does listen better than my teenagers, though.  For all that my brain is ignoring my commands, at least it is not actively walking under a cloud of surly indignation and perpetual hormonal disfunction.

I have told my husband many times that life would be much easier if we could just torch the house when it was time to move.  Not that I would, mind you.  Fire is one of my phobias.  But the option would be nice.  I’d like to roll into our next home and receive, along with our purchase or rental contract, an addendum that we could initial and check allowing us the option of cleansing fire when we are ready to move out.  That would be awesome.

Once again, not that I would do that.  Just that this cleaning and stress is for the birds.  The flipped birds, at that.

While I’m scrubbing and painting and packing, I entertain myself by trying to decide what I will do when the deadlines of home-ownership are no longer hanging over my head.   A year lost in alcoholic debauchery sounds like it might work.  I mean, it worked for Hemingway, right?  And he is one of my favorite authors.  Not that I’m anywhere near Hemingway’s league – and plus I don’t plan to bring my mister-ress (what is a kept man called, anyway?) to my home.

Actually, I can’t imagine why I’d want to have a mister-ress in the first place.  Men are pretty heavy on the upkeep.  It would be like paying Fiat dollars for a Ford Focus experience.  And Fiats have that reputation for constant problems…  No thank you.

I have waged a bloody war on extraneous items in our possession, since we’ll have things in storage for so long.  It was a scorched earth campaign the likes of which few movers have ever seen.  When the moving company showed up to take the pre-packed boxes from our house to our pre-arranged storage unit, they were quite effusive with their compliments on my organization.  To add to the good feelings, they were also in, out, and done in three hours.  Given that my previous moving experiences involved multiple clogged toilets, broken stemware, a smoker who felt that no one would catch him if he lit up in my bathroom with the fan on, and a cartwheeling bunk-bed frame, I hope I can be forgiven for my low expectations.

And yet there are STILL small boxes littering my house.  Where did all these things come from?  Papers? Why so many papers?  And why can’t I bring myself to toss them?  Instead, they are being toted to the storage unit in our personal vehicle after I scan the pages one last time to commit their exact location to memory.

You never know when you’ll need that copy of instructions for the crock pot I have packed away.  I mean, I never actually used the instructions, but someday I might.  I might.

If not in the next house, then perhaps in the one after that.

One of the hardest things I had to set my mind to do was start working out again after my surgery last year.  It was harder than my initial introduction to boxing, I think.  Now, I love boxing workouts.  I mean, I don’t love them – not while I’m doing them.  While I’m doing them I’m sweaty and huffy and puffy and my muscles are screaming at me.  But several times during the hour workout (or two hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I do more than one) I’ll have a moment of perfect clarity when my gloved fist hits the bag and my knee turns in just right for that perfect hook.  The heavy bag makes a satisfying thwack sound when you hit it correctly, and that sound is beautiful to hear.   Hearing that sounds makes you push harder.  And when you are doing mitts with someone?  People might dismiss the jab as a sissy punch, without all the style and bling of an uppercut, but tossing out three quick, perfect jabs into the mitt makes me feel downright powerful.  I’m sure I look ridiculous doing it, but I feel like I look awesome.

And after the workout, when I’m covered with sweat, my hair is sticking up ten different directions, I smell awful, and my knees are a little shaky when I go down the stairs?  It feels awesome.  I feel like I’ve really done something well.  It’s a high.  It’s definitely a high.

But after my surgery I wasn’t able to do the sets I had done before.  My first five weeks back, my coach would only let me do half-hour training sessions, and even in those I felt exhausted and bad-sore (as opposed to the good-sore that goes away after an hour or so). Not only could I not do the 200+ sit-ups in multiple sets that I had been knocking out pre-surgery, I could barely do fifteen.  It’s been ten months, and while I can knock out multiple sets of twenty-five push-ups in a class – I still can’t stretch out fully and have to do girl push-ups.  Those aren’t real push-ups.

It was very frustrating, especially to be in a class pushing myself as hard as I could go, and finding I couldn’t even get to half the place I was at before surgery.  I’ve long ago come to terms with the fact that I can’t control things outside myself (like waiting for military orders to come, expecting them to come on time, where we might be living next, whether my husband will be home when a big life event happens – that sort of thing), but I’ve always been able to control myself.   So when my own body betrayed me and I could no longer control myself, it hit me very hard.  First, while recuperating, it was the humiliation of needing a babysitter* while my husband was gone.  Then, while building back up after my scar tissue all developed, it was the embarrassment of knowing I had been able to do some things easily before and now had some intense trouble with.

My scar, by the way is about the size of a closed fist – it looks a bit like a hole in my stomach.  I don’t mind it, though.  I actually kind of like it.  I think it makes me look tough (even though it’s always covered by clothing).  I was actually considering getting a tattoo of a Cthulu mouth around it.  My doctor wants me to get a scar revision after it softens fully, but I don’t know.  I really don’t mind it.

Anyway, it’s been getting better.  Slowly.  I’m back up to the amount of training I did pre-surgery.  And most of the time I feel like I’m pushing myself adequately.  I’m even running again.  And I hate running.  I really hate running.  I hate running more than I hate cleaning up the dog poo from the yard.

Then allergy season hit.  And now I can’t breathe.  So today when I showed up at the gym for my personal training session, I found myself huffing and puffing through the second round on the mitts.  Huffing and puffing.  Like a steam train.

Embarrassing.

The trees here are lovely right now.  Gorgeous whites, pinks, and purples – explosions of color everywhere I work.  And I want to set them all on fire.  I’ve got the sneezing and watery eyes under control thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, but it doesn’t help the breathing problems.  Or the frustration of just reaching a goal and having a wall go up between me and that goal again.

However, I’m not allergic to smoke.  I’m soothing myself with visions of beautiful trees bursting into flames.  And then visions of five rounds of mitts in the ring, then holding my arms up in victory, Rocky-style – all the while breathing fully and deeply of the blessedly pollen-free air.

I can’t wait until allergy season is over.

*You know you have good friends when one of them comes to stay with her toddlers at your non-childproofed house to drive you to doctor appointments and make sure you eat while your husband is on an entirely different continent.  And I’m a horrible patient.  HORRIBLE.  Did I mention that I’m a terrible patient?  Because I have an issue with following directions.  Which is how I ended up with surgical complications in the first place. 

Our family is gearing up for our move.  It’s a big one.  We will have movers for part of it, since we’re moving overseas, but since we have to prepare our house for renters we’re packing quite a lot and moving it into storage ourselves.

Last night, as we packed up the car for yet another trip to the storage unit, we had a conversation with one of the neighbors.  Now, our neighborhood isn’t the most beautiful neighborhood in our town, and our houses aren’t the most expensive.  But what we do have is a close group of people who look out for each other.  If my neighbor sees UPS has left a package on my doorstep, one of them will pick it up and text me so that it doesn’t get stolen, wet, or blown away by wind.  There’s an elderly man who lives in one of the townhouses at the corner who sits on his porch a lot.  He notices everyone going in and out – and has let us know when he thinks there are suspicious people around.  I’ve had wonderful people shovel my walk while my husband was deployed, and others bring dinner by when my four week recovery from surgery turned into five months after complications.

I live in a very good neighborhood.  And a very supportive civilian neighborhood for a military family.

And yet, sometimes I’m still smacked in the face with the military-civilian gulf.  I have so many civilian friends who seem to understand – or understand that they don’t understand, that when I’m faced with someone who does not it feels like an actual physical slap.  Last night, it was this statement by a neighbor and very good friend, “I could never leave my kids like that.  I can’t even go visit my family without them.”

Now, my neighbor meant nothing untoward by this.  He really didn’t, and it is impossible to be offended by the statement.  He’s a nice guy, he’s a great neighbor.  He’ll do anything to help us when he can, particularly when my husband is off doing his thing.  But he doesn’t understand.  And he’s not alone in not understanding.   And when you don’t understand, such a statement seems inane and harmless, just conversation.

Except that my husband has missed four out of nine of my son’s birthdays due to deployments and TDYs.  He’s missed five of my eleven year old daughter’s birthdays.  He’s missed Christmas and Thanksgiving.  Last Fourth of July was the first one he was able to barbecue for in quite awhile.  He’s missed First Communions and he’s missed Confirmations.

Normally we go along and get along.  We’ve learned that it’s not the holiday, it’s when we celebrate the holiday.  And we have learned to cherish every moment we have.  As one of my friends said the other day in a large group of military spouses, “It’s annoying when your husband leaves his boots out.  But when he leaves them out now, I tell myself to be glad – because if his boots are out he’s home.  And if both boots are out, it means he’s home in one piece.”

In many ways, I feel lucky to see the world this way.  There are bigger problems than the fact that my husband’s moving to-do list was far less complicated and time-consuming than mine.  I kvetched about it a little on Facebook, but it wasn’t a real complaint.  It’s a joke.  Because if he weren’t home, I’d be working through BOTH our to-do lists on my own.  It’s happened many times.

Perspective.

But still, hearing, “I could never leave my kids like that,” hits home.  Because my neighbor never missed a birthday.  Never missed a Christmas.  And although we’ve come to terms with our lifestyle, it still hits my husband in the solar plexus harder than a left hook to be reminded of it by someone who hasn’t missed these things.

It’s hard to explain the trade-off for us.  The closest I can come to an explanation is this:  until my son was about five years old, he referred to anyone in a combat uniform as “Armyguysuperhero”.  That was, still is, his father.  He doesn’t idolize basketball stars, he doesn’t want to grow up to be a football player or a movie star.  He wants to save the world.  And that is what he thinks his father does.  My son wants to grow up to be a superhero.

And sometimes superheroes miss birthdays.