This retreat was 100% necessary.

It is hard for me to even sit here and describe how desperate I was to get away two weeks ago because I returned fully restored, better than before. I am on the other side of that mental wall of misery now. Life is good and happy again, and I fully mean that.

When I packed my bags and left Alan with the boys, I did not even fully grasp why I need this so badly. I just knew that Alan works at home now, so he could handle the boys for the weekend just fine.

I did not realize how bad off my mental/emotional state truly was until I sat down on the airplane, buckled my seatbelt, was looking out the window, and heard a child cry. This was probably a preschool aged child. How many times have I flown with a child and had to quiet down a baby or a toddler on an airplane?

When I hear that sound, my heart always goes out to the parents. I have been that parent so many times. This time though the sound of the crying hit something deeper in my brain, down in my spirit, something I have pushed to the corners that comes overflowing out when I least expect it.

Tears.

No! No! I am not going to sit here and silently cry on this airplane. It is hard to explain why tears were so close to the surface, but I am going to try to explain myself anyway. All those memories of handling babies and toddlers on airplanes, they are all tied up in difficult memories I have of the hard work that I put in through all these years of being an Army wife.

I hear that crying, and instantly I am twenty-five years old, flying alone with my six-month-old to begin a new life in Texas. Alan will follow me in two weeks, but for now it is just me and the baby.

At the same time, I am twenty-eight years old, flying with a toddler and four-year-old alone because I wanted to visit Alabama longer than Alan had off from work. That day the flight was delayed two hours, and after hours of keeping the boys entertained in the airport, I was already on edge when I got on the airplane where I had to make sure Joshua did not come in contact with any peanuts, which seemed to be everywhere in those days.

The sound of the crying starts, and suddenly I was thirty-two, flying home with one-year-old John David to visit my parents who I do not get to see very often because we have lived in the D.C. area for five years. I remember that day there was a super kind lady on the plane who walked down the aisle and gave me a new and different toy for J.D. to play with so he would stop crying.

I am thirty-three years old, flying with all four of our boys to California. Mom flew with me because Alan is already in school.

There were so many moves, and there were so many airplane rides with small children and me. Somehow Alan usually was not there, and I cannot even remember all of them or why I took all of them. I just remember standing in the aisle, softly singing to my baby so he would not cry on the airplane.

I remember landing at BWI airport, with a baby, I don’t even remember which one, in tow, and completely unable to find my car in the parking garage at eleven p.m.

So all of this starts to flash through my head, and water is beginning to leak out of my eyes, while my nose fills up with the overflow of salty tears. I stiffen myself. NO! This is not the place. Every flight attendant on this airplane knows who I am because I am flying with Jennings. (I was alone in a three-person seat though, thanks to the rona.)

Instead, I focused my brain as hard as I could on praying that child to stop crying. He or she was asleep in like one minute. Thank you, Jesus!

Thankfully, I recovered, and Jennings soon joined me to talk all the way to Atlanta.

I had NO idea my brain was going to go in that direction from a simple airplane ride.

But the thing was that my head was already in that fragile place, from all the recent weeks of feeling trapped and homesick, so the airplane ride just kind of nudged me closer to the edge.

The first time this ever happened was the day I listened to a speech about the Combat Reboot program at my church. It just sort of lanced an emotional boil that had been festering for a while. Ew. Gross imagery. Sorry, guys.

Let me explain about that. Our church here in Maryland, back in the days when we all got to go to normal church, has a Combat Recovery program. One day the organizer for the Combat Recovery program spoke at a church business meeting. She was promoting the program and looking for new people to join and/or lead it. Alan has even been asked to lead the group, as it has to be lead by a combat veteran, but this is not Alan’s calling. I totally get that, as I feel that way about many things. Being a combat veteran does not automatically make you a good leader for veterans with PTSD.

I, of course, am not at all a combat veteran. Nor do I have combat PTSD. I have never seen war, lived with the daily threat of enemy fire, or had to watch friends die or be mutilated. Those are certainly not my issues.

However, as she stood up there talking about military veterans and their spouses and the challenges that they face and how this group can help them, I became a complete and total WRECK. I sat there and silently bawled my eyes out for what felt like twenty minutes. It was so humiliating and unexpected.

“Why??” I kept wondering. Why am I crying so much, and why can’t I stop??? And I could. not. stop. crying. It was terrible.

It was like every time she said the word “military” my heart just poured out more grief. This is so hard to explain, but again, I will try. I literally was left wondering if military wife PTSD could possibly be a thing. Maybe this is because this could be our last duty station? Or because we are nearing our twenty year mark? I don’t know, but suddenly, here it is.

When I was at this meeting, we had only moved in three or four months past. I was fresh off two years of moving in a row, five moves in four years, and eleven moves in eighteen years. Then there were those year long, fifteen-month, and six-month long deployments where I juggled the kids.

So many nights of being new in town, and it is like all the emotions of all those hard things that we dealt with in the midst of all these years as a military family just piled on top of each other in a very untidy fashion. You know how you stack things that are not equal sizes, and if you stack big things on top of little things and crooked on top of straight, and after a while it all just starts to slide?

Well, that day we had a full on avalanche of pent up feelings. When you are tense and fighting through a move or a family separation or a war deployment or being new year after year after year after year, it catches up with you.

This had never happened to me before, crying over I was not even sure what! I think it is the eighteen years of it just catching up with me. We could retire in two years, and I am so extremely ready to do just that. Retire and buy a house in Alabama, land of my forefathers. Maybe the Army thing possibly being almost over is a whole other part of it. I don’t know.

All the feelings started to come out my eyes and my nose:

-hurt -disappointment -uncertainty -inadequacy -failure

-abandoned– So many times I felt abandoned to deal with raising the boys alone. It was not Alan’s fault. He was doing his job, and that meant he had to go overseas sometimes. I knew that with my head, but sometimes it felt an awful lot like plain old alone. Maybe it was wrong, but it was a feeling I had to deal with.

-exhaustion -confusion -worry -frustration -anger

Well, obviously, I could go on and on. That was when I realized that no, Alan was right, combat recovery was not a good program for us. He did not feel like he needed it, and I needed recovery too much to go. That would have been a whole lot more of facing all those emotions that busted out all suddenly on me, and I could not handle it. I really couldn’t.

That incident was late last fall, and I had not had another moment of raw emotion like that one at the church business meeting until this flight to Florida.

But I am happy to tell you that I held it together for another twenty-four hours.

Then I spilled it all out onto Jennings, and somehow I feel like I ACTUALLY worked through it, to the point that I am not even the same and I am able to sit here and type about it without coming apart at the seams. I cried it all out in Florida. Poor Jennings! She got an earful!

Do you know why it helped?

Maybe crying it out, facing your problems, and talking about it always helps. I am not sure, but there was an extra layer present at Jennings’ beach bungalow. That added factor was the way that she pointed me back to what matters, to Jesus. She kept pulling up her Church at the Highlands telecasts and Christian music playlists, and it was exactly what I needed.

With God on your side, you are not relying on your own inner strength alone to get you through hard things. With God there is a bigger comforter and help that goes further than you could get on your own.

Jennings and I talked about our current problems, and we laughingly discussed and debated our old foes too. Together, we even combed Facebook and successfully found one of our friends from college days who we thought we would never be able to find. It was so good just to see her smiling face, looking exactly the same.

Every morning we ate our eggs and walked on the beach. Ugh, I would rather have cereal or a pop tart like in my younger days. Why won’t my pant size cooperate with that??

Then every evening we would take one or two walks. Two different nights we went out around midnight to search the beach for sea turtles laying eggs in the dark. There were none to be found though.

We got sun burned, ate lunch on the beach under our umbrella, and even went souvenir shopping. You might be happy to know that even down in Florida, they took our temperatures at the store, and everyone was required to wear a mask.

I got the cutest souvenirs ever, and I bought every single one of my boys (even Alan) a new Melbourne Beach t-shirt.

With every ounce of seriousness inside of me, I am telling you that this trip was a gift from God. He knew I needed it, and I am so thankful I got to go. The Lord saw my exasperation with lockdown isolation and homesickness, and he blessed me with a ticket to get me through until we visit our family in August.

If you are feeling miserable, pray!! Pray for help. You never know what that help may look like or what form it may come in, but don’t turn it down when it arrives!! You never know what God may have in store for you.

Seize the day! And pray!

We cannot wait to see all of our dear family in August! You will be getting the most desperate-for-people and visiting version of us ever. Ha! I hope you are ready!

The post Weekend Retreat: Dealing with Military Wife PTSD. Is that a thing? appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

Have you had to look a little harder for joy over the past few months of pandemic? Do you find the coronavirus and the news to all be a little discouraging?

Feeling down and being in a place of seeking joy has happened to me many times over the years, not because I am totally Sadness all the time because I am not. It is just that hard times call for digging a little deeper, and we are definitely in difficult places these days. There have been months where I sat down and searched out instances in the Bible where it mentions joy, just to teach myself and help pull out of the funk from moving year after year after year as an Army wife.

That is why I was excited to write out this booklet to share with you what I have found in my own joy-quests. Each of the eight days focuses on easy ways to refocus your mind to a calmer, more joyful place. 

And yes, of course, 8 Days of Finding Joy During a Pandemic is free for all my readers. It is an easy read too, at only 25 pages long.

Here is an outline of what you will find in this booklet:

• What do you enjoy?
• The Importance of Joy
• One Simple Lesson that Brought Joy Back to My Life
• What are you focusing on?
• What is it that we long for?
• Don’t let your joy rest in the hands of others.
• Thinking Positively When You Feel Surrounded by Negatives
• Don’t let the news drink your coffee.

Save it to your desktop while you go through the chapters this week to make it easier to find each day. I decided to give you the whole thing at once because who wants eight separate emails? 

Now, of course, we are not about to solve all your problems with a booklet.

…But I am hoping it will be a pick-me-up/encouraging read for you.

I would love to hear from you all about your answer to the Day 1 prompt, so if you’d like to share, send me an email or a blog comment, and tell me what it is that you enjoy doing.

To download the Choosing Joy booklet, sign up below, and it will be delivered to your email:

And of course, if you are already one of my newsletter subscribers, I have already sent this out to you. Check your inbox!

The post 8 Days of Finding Joy During a Pandemic appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

I love telling you the sweet, happy stories every week, but the truth is not everyone’s story is either of those things. When one tells a story, one must tell the whole entire story. I would be amiss to leave this part out.

Shelby, the duplex neighbor I mentioned here, was still in this downward spiral. Her husband, Dylan, was overseas just as the rest of ours’ were, but she’d taken up with this Muslim man. His car was always parked in her driveway, so Shelby wasn’t bothering to hide this.

Meanwhile, she was still cussing her husband out on the phone, as well as occasionally cussing out the new boyfriend, and this was all Shelby’s general pattern so it didn’t feel like anything new to me.

One time Katherine, my other next door neighbor, asked me, “April, what about Shelby, are you not going to try to save her?” Now Katherine was saying this half-sarcastically anyway, as she had sworn off all “organized religion” for herself.

I just looked at her with big eyes.

“Nooooo, no. I am not about to deal with that level of crazy.”

I could not save Shelby. Dylan could not save Shelby. The new boyfriend couldn’t save her either. No one but Shelby and Jesus himself could save her.

My actual interactions with Shelby were few and far between, though I heard her everyday on the other side of our ridiculously thin wall.

I could count our actual conversations on one hand. There was the time I mentioned before when the police came, the time she borrowed my vacuum cleaner (and two months later I was STILL waiting for her to return it…), and the day of the spider incident.

Did I ever mention the spider incident? Well! Let ma tell ya.

I had just returned home from the grocery store. After bringing all my bags in, I was putting groceries away from off the table, and there in the middle of my dining area floor, was THE spider. I was later told that this was a garden spider, but to me it looked like some sort of gigantic Harry Potter spider. This thing was as big as my hand, and I am not exaggerating a bit!!

Terrifying!

So there we were, and what was I to do? Alan wasn’t coming home for months yet, and I certainly couldn’t kill it. No way could I get close enough to it to kill it. I do NOT handle creepy-crawly things. I do NOT. It is not in me.

“Who in the world could take care of this for me,” I thought, and it came to me. Shelby was 2 things:

1. She’s a mom, the only mom on the street, and moms do gross things… and

2. Shelby is scary herself. She could totally take this spider.

I was desperate, so I knocked on her door. It was 12pm, and she answered in her bathrobe. I’d clearly woken her up. Her bleached blonde hair was all catty-wompus, her eyeliner which is usually an inch or two thick, was all over her face, and she looked annoyed. Ha! But who was I to judge? Back then, I routinely slept until lunch time.

“Um…” I definitely stuttered through this, “Do you, um, kill spiders? There’s this ginormous one in my living room.”

Then it was her turn to get the wide eyes..”uh..Okay, I’ll come see.”

I escorted her into my living room and pointed at the offending monster.

“Ewwwww, do you have paper towels, or a napkin?”

“What!!!???” I thought, and probably SAID out loud. A paper towel!!?? I had thrown a lamp at it, and that hadn’t worked. How was she going to kill this thing with a paper towel!!??

I dutifully rolled off literally 20 paper towels and quickly handed them to Shelby.

She looked at me like I was complete bonkers and tore off ONE.

And then, y’all! She grabbed that spider up with that one little old paper towel and squashed it.

My eyes were popping out of my head. This was both horrifying and amazing.

I don’t remember if she flushed it or threw it away, but wow.

So…..all people have their redeeming qualities….and I had to respect her for this!

******

Shelby didn’t know much about me either. She knew I helped her out with her kids sometimes and the cops that one time, and she knew my husband was gone too. She probably knew all the neighbors hung out without her.

Also I should confess…..I used to sing to Shelby.

Say what?? Okay, I know that sounds weird, but it wasn’t really. See, remember we had the  thin walls. The bathrooms and the master seemed to be the thinnest, and by nature I am a singer. I can’t help it. It’s what I do. If I’m not singing, I’m humming or whistling.

I keep it in check in public, but at home, that’s my space to sing out as loudly as I want. And we all know that bathrooms have the best acoustics, right? So that’s where I sing the loudest when I really want to belt out a powerful song.

Shelby’s family needed some powerful songs, but not just Brittney Spears. They needed the gospel. So what do you think I sang? I sang How Great Thou Art and It is Well and my favorite Jaci Velasquez and Point of Grace songs.

So you might say she knew me better than you think. Was it annoying or endearing? Judging by the state of mind she was usually in, I’m guessing it was annoying. But I could no more not sing than I could just not eat, so it was what it was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By-8BN316mM

************

Fast-forward a few months, and one gossip talking to another gossip who talked to another gossip. Rest assured, I was not involved in this particular gossip trail, as I didn’t know any of Dylan and Shelby’s friends or co-workers….but the thing is your sins really do eventually find you out.

And Shelby left a steady trail. Dylan’s superiors in Iraq knew all about her affairs, and they did something that might surprise you.

They shipped Dylan home to get his house in order, and they switched him to rear duty, so he was home to stay.

Around the first of October, Dylan just showed up at home one day.

First, there was an epic fight. Of course. Then Dylan packed himself and his two children up and left.

For two weeks, things were fairly quiet, and the boyfriend’s car was never seen there again.

Then as suddenly as they’d left, they were back, both Dylan and the children. They moved back in with Shelby. I guess this was their attempt to work things out.

Shelby’s defense was that their marriage was over even before he left. Emotionally that was true for her, but technically it wasn’t true at all.

It didn’t take long before Shelby moved out, and for the rest of our time there it was Dylan and his kids living there. Actually, it was them PLUS Shelby’s oldest son, who wasn’t Dylan’s, but he said he was the only person that kid had who’d really take care of him.

Elsie and I went over and introduced ourselves to Dylan. He asked us if we’d be willing to testify if it came to court as a custody battle. We said we would, but we never had too. Shelby willingly surrendered them over to him.

All in all, it was a heart-breaking saga to watch play out from the very beginning, though I’m thankful that those kids do have a dad who cares for them and was looking out for them.

In situations like that, you hope for the best, but I’ve always wondered if there was a happy ending of any kind for that family. Did Shelby ever face her demons and calm down? What ever happened to them? Did those sweet children go on living with Dylan?

I like to think they did.

SaveSave

The post Shelby is Busted appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

My last post was about how miserable I was as a teacher. Alan must have called me the morning after my first or second day of teaching from Iraq.

What he wrote in response to my hardship is one of the most touching, empathetic, heartfelt letters I have ever read. No, he wasn’t physically there, and yet with this letter you can see how he was still obviously there for me when I needed him most.

Tues., 19 Aug., 2003

6:35 am

April,

I love you, April. I just got off the phone with you, and I’m bursting with feelings of grief, sorrow, sympathy….things I’ve never felt so strongly for anyone else before…only myself!!! April, I hurt so bad for you right now, but indeed, I am giving it all to God RIGHT NOW, our Rock, our Fortress, our Comforter, our Lord.

Oh, April, how I wish there were something I could do, there! Aaaugh!!!

But what this has done is it has forced me to go to my knees and begin this battle by asking for help where the most help will come from!

April, I know you can do it (teach) and do it EXTREMELY well….However, enjoying it is a completely different story! April, if it’s still this bad by the time you get this letter then I have no problem with you quitting.

When you feel bad, it really makes me feel sick at my stomach….literally. And when you said you’ve been too stressed out to eat all day long, I could have cried! Now I don’t have an appetite!

Oh, April, I just love you so, so much. I want so badly to be there with you. God knew this was coming all along just like he saw everything coming that’s happened over here. He wants us to turn to Him for strength! He loves us so much more than we can even imagine!

Oh, April, I love you so much. I feel so terrible, but I know God will get us through this and when it’s passed, the three of us will all be that much closer!

1 Peter 5:7   “Cast all your anxiety on Him because he cares for you.”

April, I love you…and I am praying for you harder than ever!

Always Yours,

Alan

*******

Y’all must think I am pathetically weak to fall apart at such a thing as having a job that I hated. Ha! That’s how it felt at the time though.

Alan took this trial on as his own, not just as mine, even though we were oceans apart. That’s how you support your spouse from overseas. He never once downplayed my unhappiness, even though he was in a WAR zone, and I was simply unhappy at work.

I forged through the first four weeks of teaching.

There was the day I even got to work so early, I set off the school alarm and caused all sorts of trouble. But gracious, why did they give me a key if I also needed an alarm code!?

There were parent/teacher conferences where I faked “happy teacher” as well as I possibly could.

I was an emotional mess. I lost 20 pounds and got down to a pitiful-looking 110 pounds, on a 5 foot 6 frame.

During this time, three soldiers from Alan’s unit, 4-42 Field Artillery, were killed in action in Iraq.

Up until this point, I’d built Alan’s Iraqi world in my mind as not a super dangerous place. This wasn’t anything like the Vietnam War, I figured. Alan was hooking up utilities and working with the Mayor’s office of Ad Dwar. He worked with the local civilians, so he must be okay, right?

Then came the three deaths, and these weren’t faceless names on the news. These were men in our very own unit. Reality once again nudged at me with a pitchfork. “Wake up, April, your husband is in combat. That’s why he gets “hazardous duty” pay. This is real, and anyone you know, including Alan, could be next.”

I didn’t say much about that to anyone, I stuffed my feelings inside…

only to let them come roaring to a head when children in my class made fun of the pledge and danced around making faces and wouldn’t stand up straight and put their hand over their heart.

That was it, the proverbial final straw. I was leading my 3rd and 4th graders in the pledge, and THAT KID kept goofing off and disrespecting the flag, the teacher, the country, in my mind everything, and of course, it had to be the very kid whose mother was constantly bothering me. (Look, I still treated him very nicely. I was professional, but this day his behavior set me over the edge that I was already falling off of.)

So what did I do?…..Well, I went on a tirade, giving the offending boy, his buddies around him, and the entire class, a very thorough lesson on the reason we say the pledge with respect. I reminded them that many of their mothers and fathers, and step-fathers, and cousins, and my husband were overseas fighting for us, and the least we could do was show proper respect. They were passionately instructed on sacrifices made during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. I exalted the importance of respect in general.

The class was silent and wide-eyed. They were like 10. What did they know?

It wasn’t really them I was losing it with. It was me, it was the world, it was everything. That morning I had a high school student in my classroom as a teacher’s assistant. I instructed her to watch the class, and I fled to the bathroom to cry and get my act together.

I stared at my sleep-deprived, red, mascara-streaked, freckle-covered, miserable face in the bathroom mirror. “What kind of a teacher am I? I have got to get out of this!”

Soon after, the administration announced that it was time for us to sign our contracts.

My mind reeled.

Then the moment came. Mrs. W. asked me to come by her office to sign my contract, and I had to tell her.

Mrs. W. was the principal’s wife, but she was also the assistant principal. She was an adorably cute but commanding and accomplished, small African-American woman with super curly hair. If she had asked me to please stay, I might have caved, as she was such a great leader. I looked up to her. It was humiliating to have to confess this to her.

“I can’t sign the contract because…because I don’t think I can finish this job and stay here all year.”

Mrs. W. looked so surprised.

Cue the waterworks. I tried not to cry, but there was no stopping them.

“This is so hard for me to quit, admitting defeat, and leaving these children with no teacher, but this job is too much for me. I cannot do this. I can’t tell you how hard it is for me to admit this. You know Chelsea?”

“Yes, Chelsea, yes,” she listened intently. I know she was in shock. They all seemed to think I was doing just fine.

Chelsea was a student in my class, well known for being capable and working hard. Her mother also supported her well.

“I was Chelsea. I was that girl. Success mostly came easily, and now here I am, and this is it for me. This is my first time to completely fail at something.”

“Oh,” she said, and she said other things, motivating things, and she asked me to please sleep on it, but I knew there was no turning back. I put in my 2 weeks’ notice.

I wanted out of this job as much as you’d want to escape a 0 degree dungeon infested with rats and cockroaches. Teaching was so very not a match for me.

**********

The first week of my notice, I still struggled to get out of bed and go to school. One day I called in sick with a “migraine.” I didn’t have a migraine. I had a bad-life-choices-hangover, the kind you get from regret and confusion.

I felt guilty from lying about the migraine, so I went to work all the other days of my notice.  People there were kind. A replacement followed me around that last week.

She leveled with me, “Why are you leaving? You’re doing great. You should stay.”

I began to actually consider it. That last week wasn’t so bad. Some things actually started to click. It was week 6. My LD kid was learning his own spelling words and reading his own beginner books. Maybe I was making a mistake. Maybe I should stay.

I came in the Saturday after my last day to finalize the 6 weeks’ grades for the report cards. Mr. and Mrs. W. were there going through my class’ papers too.

Mrs. W. talked as she sorted, “All of the assessments are here, April. This is good. You know, we didn’t really believe that you’d quit. We thought you’d change your mind and come in Monday.”

Ever so young and dumb, and still excited about not being a teacher anymore, I didn’t get the hint. She was totally giving me another chance to stay. Perhaps I should have taken it.

I’ve always wondered if I made the right decision that year.

Did I just quit when things got hard? Yes. Yes, in the career realm that is EXACTLY what I did, which sounds weak, wrong, and disappointing.

I re-hashed that decision in my mind for years, but the thing is you can’t go back and fix the past. What would it have been like had I stuck it out, and why didn’t I??

Looking back now, I see so many different things going on. I was immature, and my deal-with-it- tank was already full from the moving away from home and sending my husband overseas in the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

There was nothing more anyone could have done for me. It was simply more than I felt I could handle at the time, and I have to make my peace with that and move on. Could I handle that job now, at 36? Yes, it would still be hard, but not the horrible misery it was at 22.

But that’s the thing about the past.

Our mistakes and failures are what make us sweeter, humbler, more merciful people, and sometimes also tougher, more dependable people, so long as we learn from them. I regretted quitting mid-year so much that I have been loathe to ever quit mid-stream again in anything.

You accept the past for what it is and learn from it all that you can.

The post My First Colossal Failure & My Supportive Spouse Overseas appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

I tell you this particular chapter with hesitation and humility. It’s an embarrassing story, but at the time, this was my reality. I hope you can laugh with me now, and rest assured that I am not normally this paranoid. I promise.

When Alan first deployed, it was suddenly like….cue the sound of crickets.

The night of the deployment dragged on until dawn, so first, I went to bed and slept until the afternoon. (And thus began my new problem of having my days and nights mixed up.)

That first morning, Alan called me from the Killeen airport around noon, which woke me up. Even then, I was already so excited to hear his voice, and he hadn’t even left the country yet!

I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be a MONTH before I would hear from Alan again, except in letters, real snail-mail letters.

So there I was in Texas, alone, 22-years-old, no job, no children, and no plans, a brand-spankin’ new military wife.

What to do now? I had no idea. It sounds like bliss to have zero people depending on you and almost zero responsibility. Wow! Each phase of life truly brings something different to the table. But blissful is not how I recall feeling.

Instead, I began to be depressed, and I didn’t even know why. Obviously, it had something to do with this crazy start our marriage was off to and anxiety over sending my husband overseas to a new war. I had also developed a miserably painful case of TMJ, seemingly the moment I said good-bye to Alan, which would not go away. I could hardly chew anything.

Plus, I was a little isolated, having been in Texas for only three months, with almost everyone I knew in the world still in Alabama.

People I met asked me uncomfortable questions, over and over again.

“So what do you do? Do you have a job yet? Are you staying here?”

Everything in me knows that it isn’t wise to let what others think you should do affect your decisions, and yet it did.

Why was my answer never good enough?

What did I do, you ask? Well I…..

• kept house
• wrote my husband a letter every single day
• made my meals
• worked on decorating my first house
• typed out every letter I received from my husband for his family to read
• washed my clothes
• bought a new sofa
• watched a billion episodes of Friends
• and played board games versus myself.

Awesome, right?

That’s never what I actually said to people who asked, but I wish it had been!

Instead, I took this all as pressure (whether it was or not) to have some sort of career goal. Look, up to this point, my life goal had been to go to college. But I was done with that now.

Once in college, I’d had one half-hearted career goal to be a physical therapist. But once I closed my eyes through the entire video of a cadaver dissection in junior year biology lab, I knew this physical therapy plan was not going to work out…

…So after that there had been no career goal.

Now I was 22, and finished with college, but there was still so much figuring- things- out to do!

I did have a bachelor’s degree in Psychology, from the University of Alabama, so many people suggested I try out the alternative teacher certification that Texas offered at the time. Anyone with a bachelor’s degree could simply take a crash course in education, pass the “highly qualified”  national teacher exam, and bam! Texas grants you a probationary teaching certificate, and you’re a teacher. Technically, your first year was considered an internship.

Hmmmm….I did always love school….and passing tests was always a strength of mine…so why not?

Did I have a dream of teaching children? No, not at all.

Was I good at managing children? Also no.

But hey! Everyone says this is a great idea, so let’s do it. Let’s make the people happy. I’d always been good at that too.

I enrolled in the classes and was accepted right away. Teacher school started a month after Alan left.

This whole married young adult thing was working out okay. I now had a plan, a few friends, and a goal I wasn’t the least bit excited about. In fact, I dreaded it.

Looking back, all I can think is “why???” Why did I do all this? Was it really just to appease all the questioners? Ugh!

So I had a career goal, but did it fill the husband-deployed void?

No, not at all, because I didn’t even truly have a desire to be a teacher anyway. In fact, maybe that just added to my misery.

I did various things throughout the days to keep myself busy, like joining a ladies Bible study where no one really spoke to me much, attending an aerobics class with my friend Theresa, even though I dislike aerobics classes, and I often played Skipbo versus myself….(Skipbo is a card game, sort of like Uno. Yes, I know that sounds a little sad, but this was the pre-Facebook, pre-Skype, pre-iPhone world. No one had to know!!)

Okay, it’s true. I didn’t have much to be all that happy about.

But every night I looked forward to watching the Lifetime evening line up. There was an hour of Designing Women followed by an hour of Golden Girls. How I loved it, but I also lived in dread of it.

The thing is that once the credits rolled on Golden Girls, there was nothing else on that I wanted to watch, and I felt like staying up past midnight was the “wrong” thing to do. You know? There’s just something less respectable sounding about being an up all night, sleeping to noon kind of gal. (Silly, I know, but that’s how I felt–guilty about every silly little thing!)

I didn’t want that to be me. Before I had always been such a hard-working well-respected member of society! My first job was at the age of 15!! The day care managers called ME and asked me to obtain a work permit and come work for them after school.

I had a job ever since, even in college, even when I was taking 21 hours of classes. My on campus job was a cushy one, working at the University of Alabama National Alumni Association, with the sweetest boss ever. But still, I had always been employed.

Not only was I employed for all of my time as a teen and young adult, but I had also maintained a strong GPA, earned scholarships and grants to pay my way through college, and worked an a Resident Assistant in the dorm.

The transition to unemployed, geographically alone, housewife knocked me for a loop. There was just so much to decide and change. It was exciting, but it was terrifying.

Come 12am each night, I became all squirrelly in the head. I heard every little sound. Every little bump.

Most nights I could not actually go to sleep until about 4am because I reasoned that by 4am, no one was going to break into my house. It was practically dawn.

Why did I think people wanted to break into my cute little duplex? I have no idea. We owned next to nothing really.

Between 12 and 4 am I was beyond reason anyway. All logic was gone. Every sound was a criminal.

Then it happened.

One night, someone rang my doorbell. I was sitting in the living room a little later than usual. It might’ve been 10 pm. I was up watching endless episodes of Friends.

I looked out the peephole and didn’t see anyone. A few minutes later, the doorbell rang again. I opened the door. No one was there.

At 11 o’clock, or maybe even later, it happened again!!

Now that’s a little odd anyway, but for a depressed woman with paranoia, it was obviously a gang that was stalking my house. Maybe even an ax murderer!!

Well, I did the only logical thing to my temporarily insane brain. I called 911!!!

“This is 9-1-1. What’s your emergency?”

“I’m home alone and someone keeps ringing my doorbell, and there’s no one there!”

“Hmm. Yeah, it’s probably just kids. Did you see anyone?”

“No.” I was probably crying…

“Well, we’ll send someone to check the area, okay?”

“Okay. Thank you, thank you so much!”

I hung up the phone. The doorbell rang again.

Why were they here to torture me???? Hadn’t I been through enough????

I turned out the lights and peeked out the curtains. There was little Hannah, my next door neighbor’s 9-year-old-ish kid, crouching behind some bushes.

Relief. Phew! Okay.

That I could handle, but I didn’t go outside and bother her. Though in hindsight, she probably did it because she craved attention.

Hannah’s mother, Shelby, was another source of my misery. I continued to hear Shelby cussing people out on her phone, at the top of her lungs, about 2 or 3 nights per week. No wonder I didn’t feel super safe.

No, I would never utter a cross word to Hannah or her little brother Houston. I felt terribly sorry for them. Who else’s kids would even be out that late, running around the neighborhood ringing door bells?

But night after night, I continued to stay up late, unable to sleep.

I added playing computer games on pogo.com to my list of late-night activities. See I had to stay up so I could scream and run if anyone tried to break into my house.

It made no sense whatsoever, and I knew it didn’t, but I was admittedly a little crazy. I could NOT go to sleep.

Was I spending tons of time in prayer, digging into my Bible for consolation, or seeking help? No. And I was absolutely not about to ‘seek help’. I would admit my issues to no one. I am Southern born and bred. You keep your problems to yourself. Don’t go bothering other people or admitting that you are weird.

And then one night my wake-up call came.

Golden Girls was still on. I had my bedside lamp light and my back yard porch light on. See, there was a door in my bedroom that led to my backyard.

Yet another reason I was certifiable. Of course, paranoid April believed that the intruder would come straight to my back door because it was enclosed in a privacy fence. No one could see into my backyard. Therefore, all the robbers in Killeen were clearly just waiting to break into my house, via that door that led into my master bed room!!!

That is, if the screaming lady next door didn’t scare them away, of course, but that night her place was silent.

I was sitting there in my bed watching my shows when my back door knob actually rattled! It did! It rattled.

I listened as hard as I could, heart pounding out of my chest, not daring to move a muscle.

Yes. There were definitely sounds at the door. Light ones, but sounds nonetheless.

No time to waste! I slept with the phone by my pillow in case of Alan calling or in case I needed to call the police anyway.

“This is 9-1-1. What’s your emergency?”

“Yes! Yes! There’s someone at my door I think. I don’t know. It’s…my door, my back door. It sounded like someone rattled the doorknob. I’m freaking out.”

Well, truer words were never spoken. I was definitely freaking out.

I don’t remember what she said, but she kept me calm. What happened after that, whether or not the police came quickly or not, it’s been so long ago that I don’t remember.

I do remember hopping out of bed, throwing on my bath robe, and going around peeking out windows.

The police came. They assured me there was no one in my backyard.

Somehow I finally snapped out of my insanity and realized that there was simply a bug hitting the glass, a bug that was obviously attracted to that light bulb I left on every night.

How embarrassing!

I could suddenly see myself so clearly.

How had I become such a joke?? Such a walking disaster?? All I thought about were my own problems. Most of my problems weren’t even real. They were imaginary!!

The insomnia and paranoia were feeding each other into a cycle that had to be broken. Plus, my jaw was still killing me. It was time to march down to post and see the doctor.

I resolved this was my last night in Crazy Lady Land. I vowed with every ounce of courage I still had, “Tomorrow I am going to see a doctor and admit this to someone. Maybe they can help me. Maybe I can take anxiety meds or something. I can’t go on like this. Even if they do laugh at me, I have to go get help.”

***************

Read about what happened next HERE.

Each new chapter appears on Monday morning here on storiesofourboys.com.

Want to catch up on what you’ve missed? Click here for last week’s installment, told from Alan’s mother’s perspective, or click here for a more complete list of chapters.

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The post When Alan First Deployed: My New Friends at 9-1-1 appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

I sort of felt like my whole life embodied “hot mess” this week.

Several things happened. I allowed so many activities to enter my life that I neglected one of THE most important, like helping my dyslexic-ish son with his spelling words. I put my foot in my mouth without even realizing it (but then, isn’t that always how it goes???). Oh, and my chin broke out like a teenager’s.

But hey! I’m hoping that acne on my chin is actually making me look 10 years younger. See, I’m being positive.

What a week. I got addicted to this song today because THIS is how I feel after 15 years of being an Army wife…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYCOA2jQ-XA

because let’s face it……life is messy. Or maybe yours isn’t. That sounds really nice.

BUT if you are anything like us, messes DO happen, and by golly, we want to hear about it!

Now on to last week’s featured post!

The most popular post was Inauguration Day Feelings and Thoughts, but that was on this website, so I chose the most heart-felt Hot Mess story instead.

If any of you have ever walked a child through a heart-wrenching struggle, this is one you can relate to:

When You Receive That Letter

I’m pretty sure I cried, and I have been there. Oh, boy, have I been there.

So what are you waiting for? Link up your messies!

There are no rules. Only I’d appreciate it if you’d follow me on Facebook or Pinterest, and remember it’s a family show.

Be sure to mingle and read some new blogs! Thanks for joining us!

P.S. I’m looking for a guest co-host for next week, so let me know if you are interested!! Thank you!

The post Week 3 of The Hot Mess Blog Hop appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

Daniel 3:29

Do you love a good rescue story? Man, I am a sucker for a rescue.

Lately, I’ve been feeling down. I’ve been letting circumstances get to me. I’m still pouting over losing my people in this move. I still have my family, my most important people. But I lost my support groups. I lost my friends. Friends are a tricky thing to replace. The thing is you can’t replace them because no two people are the same. It’s not possible. So you have to keep your old friends, but you have to find new friends too. I’ve met some ladies I like here, and I’ve already leaned on a few of them. We’re getting there. It’s promising. These things just take time.

Alan was gone for a great part of November for work, and it was a hard month. It was getting to me big time.

But this morning these verses in Daniel spoke to me. 

“No other god can save in this way.”  –Daniel 3:29

And those lines were spoken by the King of Babylon, who had just erected a giant gold statue of himself and proclaimed that everyone must worship it or burn.

But he saw the results. He couldn’t deny them. He SAW Jesus rescue those three Jews out of that fire when they refused to worship his ridiculous gold statue.

And that’s when he stood amazed, and he proclaimed a decree that no one was to say anything against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, “because no other god can save in this way.”

I’ve seen the results too. I might not have been there all those years ago for the fiery furnace rescue, but I have seen one rescue after another in my own time, and it lights a FIRE in my soul, let me tell you.

The Bible is not just any other book, y’all. And God is not just any statue. He’s not a statue at all. Why would you worship something so small you could DIY????

This year my parents had their own fire. In case you missed that, I talked about that here. It was a burn-it-to-the-ground kind of house fire. This thing was so impactful. I would never wish it on anyone.

But God’s raising up something beautiful from those ashes. He’s staging another rescue. My parents will move into their new house, probably next month, just in time for Christmas.

He’s making everything new and everything beautiful, and he’s blessing my parents with a new home. It smells like new paint, it is handicap accessible, and it has the prettiest master bathroom shower I have ever seen. I am so excited for them. And you know what I said at the beginning about the hardship of finding new friends? They won’t even have to worry about that because he’s building it right where their old house stood, on the same plot of land I grew up on.

They will still have their neighbors and their church family right down the street.

Don’t you love a rescue like that?

And I want to say a special thank you to the members of Victory Baptist Church and to their neighbors on their street. They blessed them in ways that I, far away in California, did not. They were there for my family when I wasn’t really. You have no idea how much that means to me. Thank you!!!

Remember the kind of God we serve. Amen. Amen. Amen.

The post I am a sucker for a rescue. appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.