Hey, y'all -
I don't mean to suggest that our summer was just wall-to-wall fun. Your dad being gone cast a definite shadow on our lives. Most of the time, I was able to keep my head down and forge ahead and make the best of it and try not to think about it. That was a lot of meaningless cliches in one sentence, I know. What I'm trying to say is I did a pretty good job of pretending to be okay. People would ask me all the time how you two were holding up without Dad, and honestly I think it didn't affect you all that much, BUT that's only because I constantly tried to do the job of two people and I pretty much exhausted myself in the process.
Towards the end of summer, some friends invited us to join them on an overnight camping trip at the lake. By this point, I had gotten pretty good at loading paddle boards on the truck and rounding up outdoor supplies, but I hadn't attempted a camping trip. Somehow, in the middle of loading up tents and poles and sleeping bags, the reality that your dad was gone sorta hit me in the gut and I sat down on the kitchen floor and started sobbing. What Oprah refers to as "going into your ugly cry." I think there was something so depressing about loading up camping gear, because outdoor stuff is where your dad shines, and instead of sitting by the lake on a nice August day with his family, he was behind concertina wire on the other side of the world. He had missed almost an entire year of making memories with his family, and the unfairness of that washed over me as I sat on the floor. Also, I was feeling sorry for myself because loading up all that stuff was hard and I had no one to help me. The price of appearing competent all the time is that no one thinks you need help when really you're dying for it.
But in other ways, life chugged along.
Hagen's preschool made a paper chain to count down the days until Thor came home.
One evening, the two of you disappeared into the bathroom for about half an hour. I knew that silence probably equaled trouble, but when you're a single mom, you find yourself asking questions like, "If whatever they're doing requires me to repaint the entire bathroom when they're done, will it be worth it for half an hour of alone time right now? Answer: yes."
Turns out Laney had painted Hagen's entire body as a "poisonous wolf." She did not miss an inch of skin, and that's all I'm going to say about that. He looked just like that famous photo of artist Keith Haring.
...but I got to eat an entire sandwich by myself and I didn't have to share and it was totally worth the effort it took to scrub off all that marker.
We filled our time with the business of everyday life as we counted down the days 'til we'd see your dad again.
We still made time to hit the river with our friends to look for pirates and eels. No sightings to report, since neither is indigenous to Montana.
Laney discovered and fell in love with the show "Top Chef." On nights when it was on, Grandma Sue would join us for dinner and Laney had permission to go into the kitchen and whip up something for us to taste, just like the chefs on the show. Her creations always involved a flour tortilla and typically included a big dramatic smear of sauce. Sue and I ate a lot of microwaved chocolate sauce tortillas last summer while trying to think of a realistic-sounding critique: "It has a delightful chewiness. It's sweet, but not too sweet and the swoosh of sauce adds the perfect soupcon of artistry." Or some such nonsense.
Ella the dog (who had promised me that she would live to see Thor's homecoming because I could not possibly deal with the passing of a family pet by myself) developed a benign fatty tumor on her front leg that had to be removed, which required several trips to the vet.
As a 12-year-old husky with arthritis and a leg tumor, and - it turns out! - Cushing's disease, Ella's days of being able to jump into the back of the Subaru are long over. I called your dad to report, "Well, the bad news is: your dog weighs 90 pounds. The good news is: your wife can squat 90 pounds." Ella and I had to give each other a little pep talk, then I'd bend down, wrap my arms around her front and back legs, and heave her fat butt into the car.
She was supposed to wear the cone of shame for two weeks, but this is a dog who can figure out how to open bottled water, so no way was that going to happen. She found out that if she opened the sliding back door about a foot, she could jam her head in the opening and with a little brute force, that thing would pop right off.
I fought her for a week, even trying to duct tape it, but on day 7, she got it off and then removed her own stitches. I sent a picture to the vet, who said, "Well, she did a great job. Looks perfect. Put some Neosporin on it and we'll call it a day."
Most nights, Hagen built himself a "nest" in the bottom of the closet next to the bed and would fall asleep there, while mumbling about the specifics of his "habitat." It was all about cheetahs for a while, and then there was a draco lizard phase, I think. Y'all, I don't know. I spent a lot of time saying "mmm hmmm...tell me more about that....Zzzzz..."
My friend Amy came to visit from California, and on the last day of her visit, because she had a late afternoon flight out, I suggested we go tubing on the river in the morning. We borrowed a two-person tube that was more or less an inflatable couch with a cooler hole in the middle. Laney joined us on her kid-sized paddle board. We were going to do a 3-mile float which normally takes a little over two hours. Lord have mercy, we got a third of the way and realized it had already been over an hour. The river wasn't moving nearly as fast as it had been just a few days before. And then it started to rain. Hard. There was one cloud in the sky and it was moving the same speed and direction as our stupid-as-hell couch tube, like our own personal storm front. I texted your dad in Afghanistan for tips on what to do, and he told me that statistically speaking, we probably wouldn't get hit by lightning, and we were probably safer staying in the middle of the river, away from the trees. Getting out wasn't really a possibility because there was a steep bank on both sides and nowhere for someone to come pick us up. Amy missing her flight was becoming a real possibility. So I tied Laney's board to the back of our tube, sat sideways so I'd be facing downriver, and paddled my butt off using Laney's kid paddle. I paddled us two miles. Couldn't move my arms the next day, but Amy made her flight and hopefully I showed Laney that panicking in the outdoors is never the way to go, and she has a mom who can solve problems while muttering some really, really bad words like a real sailor. Authenticity!
I probably wouldn't have made it through the summer (and the rest of the deployment) without the support of my girlfriends who rallied around whenever I needed them.
Tomorrow on the blog, Thor comes home! (Cliffhanger.)
Love,
Mom
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