9/11

My younger brother came barging into my room that morning, just before 9am (central time). He had this weird, panicked look on his face, and said, "A plane crashed into the World Trade Center." I argued with him for a minute in disbelief, before I realized my skinny white brother was just too pale to be lying. I went downstairs to my mom's room, where she was sitting on the floor, holding my then two year old brother in her arms, just horror-struck. As I looked towards her small TV set, saw the smoke and fire, and heard the fear in the voices on the television, my heart sank, and my life was forever altered.

Throughout the coming months and years to follow, as our country banded together and geared up for the fight that is still ongoing, 8 years later, my brother and I were struck with the unwavering desire to help. Of course, at 10 and 13, there wasn't much we could do. But I remember feeling so angry and so helpless. I didn't know how I'd help, but I vowed someday, I would. When the War on Terror began, I had my answer. I turned to my mom one day and informed her, point blank, that I'd be enlisting into the military when I was old enough. I was going to DO something.

5 years and 2 months later, still holding on to the promise, I raised my hand and swore to defend my country against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. When I shipped for basic training in January of 2007, I was nervous, sure, but not afraid. I knew whatever I had to go through, I would bear. I had no qualms about my choice. No lack of steel in my spine when it came to years of my life spent in the desert. If I did start to lose my faith in myself, all I had to do was remember the smoke rising and hear the haunting screams of people running away from the epicenter that is Ground Zero, and once again, I was ready for anything.

Now, 8 years later, my life looks quite different. After 7 months in training, I was given a medical discharge from the Army, due to injuries sustained during training. I now have a 10 month old son that I'm raising on my own, and the only support I can give to the war effort at this time is the sacrifice of my husband for a year or more as he himself serves our country in the same effort. I still hold a great love for my country in my heart. My husband and I will raise our son to have the same respect for what America stands for as we do.

Will I re-enlist someday? I have hope that I will. Right now, it's not something I can do in good conscience, with a small child at home and his daddy in a war zone himself. But as I watch the footage of that awful day run again, I'm struck with all the same feelings. I want to help. I want to do something. And most importantly of all, I have hope that, just as before, our country will rise from the ashes, stronger and smarter. We will pass this test.

sort of sorry

I haven't been around much. If you're a facebooker, you know the basics of why. Oh the drama. But I haven't been able to muster words to start at square one and go from there to process. So wine, girl talk, and deep fucking breaths are the call of the day-week-month.

I do see a light at the end, though. I feel my strength returning. We will pass this test. Be back soon. :)

a light in the dark

Sometimes, you just have "one of those days." Sometimes, "one of those days," turns into a week or two. Cue the story of my life. I think I'm at the point, almost 9 months in, where I just can't take it any more. I've said it before, when I get upset and miss my husband too much, but really... I've stopped saying it. As if to say the words aloud sap the last iota of courage and strength flowing through my veins. As if admitting that I'm having a hard time is to hang my head in defeat. It's not just the deployment, though. If it were just missing my husband for a year, it'd suck a lot of sweaty ass, but I could do it. It's the everything else thrown in for good measure. It's having to deal with life going on without your spouse. Birthdays, Christmases, anniversaries, first steps/words/haircuts of our child, moments in time that we'll never get back. It's the car battery dying, and 10 feet of snow overnight when the baby has a doctor's appointment. It's so many things that to list them would be like trying to count stars.

It's hard to justify what he's doing, what I'm doing, at this point, when it's been so long, you tend to run out of ways to placate yourself and you just try to push it out of your mind and get through 5 more minutes, and then 5 more.

One upside (besides not having to share the remote), though, is definitely the other spouses and dependents. I've found a community, a family in them that I never could have imagined. Anywhere I turn, in person or online, someone understands, someone can relate. Of course when you just want to be pissed and everyone around you knows how you feel, it does take a bit of the fire out of it, but that's pretty rare for me. Anyway this big long thing is just basically a thanks. To any and all of you who have listened to me and will continue to stand by me and help hold me up when I stumble under the pressure. Know that no matter what, I'll be there to do the same for you.

is that a sock in your diaper? ugh, wtf?

Do's and Don't's for a mom running on 3 hours of sleep, half a Coke, and 8.5 months of deployment.

1. Under no circumstance should you make life-altering decisions when you're so tired you can't see straight. Oh, by the way, congratulate me, I enrolled in nursing school today!

2. You also should not attempt to shower, as you risk mixing up your toothbrush and razor. I'll let your imagination figure out which one I mixed.

3. You should probably find alternate means of child care for the day, otherwise, you may end up with all kinds of interesting diaper changes, and a few moments of head hanging defeat as you watch a 10 month old naked ass rip roar across the living room, taunting you as if to say, "Too slow!"

4. You definitely SHOULD take a three-way call with your college freshman brother and mom. You'll be silent most of the time, trying to figure out why the word "chip" sounds so strange, but you'll probably get a few laughs out of the story behind your brother's new college nickname. Try to keep it to yourself, though, because your mom will think she should know, but in reality, you should know better than to admit he said anything starting with, "So, FUNNY STORY..." We'll tell you when he's 25, Mom. Maybe.

5. You should take notes on the last time you fed your child, because waiting until he cries, I've heard, is a late indicator of hunger and may leave you with the sneaking suspicion that it's been about 6 hours since he had a bottle, but hey, at least he got some Goldfish in there.

6. If you finally wise up just before 4pm and decide to make a pot of coffee, try not to burst into tears when you can't find your coffee filters-- they're above the stove where you've always kept them.

7. I know by now you realize that if you hear SILENCE, that you should run, but just for the record, if you hear a strange NEW noise, you should also run, because I tell you it means trouble. And that the baby discovered how to pull the 5 gallon Goldfish carton off the table and onto the living room floor. Yaaaay!

8. When your friends come downstairs to see if you want to go to the park, and your body sags in exhaustion just thinking about it, you should probably just bow out. If you go anyway, you may end up with a picture similar to this, because you were too tired to chase your son before he made it to the street, but your friends thought a picture was appropriate.

9. When the coffee is done brewing, run, don't walk. You need all the help you can get to make it to 7pm bedtime.

10. As a side note, find a new spot to hide the phone. 911 doesn't care how smart he is for dialing, they are not amused.

::edit:: also, if you've only had 3 hours of sleep, you might mention a picture, forget to post it, and end up with a living room that looks like this in the time it took you to fix your oopsie:

AHH!

I refuse to bitch about my husband in public, but that's all I've got, so I'm not blogging til I have something nice to say. Maybe on our anniversary, I'll be able to grit my teeth and get through something, or maybe something else entirely will come up blog-worthy. Until then, faithful few, just know I'm still alive and kicking (though I wish I could put my kicking foot firmly in my spouse's hind parts).

shameless plug

I started an alternate blog today with Bee, we're doing the couch to 5k together (well, apart) and we're blogging about it here. Read, bookmark, enjoy. She and I are a lot alike, but I happen to think she's funnier than I am.

Now I'm off to drink more water and take more Tylenol (I have a headache I can't get rid of). I'll blog later-- I had a good one in my head earlier, but it's lost (forever or til later I'm not sure).

snack packs and midnight musings

I've often heard that your senses are very closely tied with memory. It makes sense, though-- how many of us have caught a hint of cologne and thought of an ex (or current)? Walked into Mom's house on Thanksgiving and remembered so many other years? Heard a song and thought of the first time you heard it play?

Well at any rate, it happened to me tonight, and the place it took me was, well, a little less pleasant than turkey and cranberry sauce. I opened a chocolate pudding cup and scooped a spoonful. The minute it hit my tongue, I was taken back to being 14 and hospitalized for anorexia. I had been admitted a few days before, tipping the scales at 82 pounds, so weak and lethargic I couldn't even lift myself off of the floor where I was laying to watch TV. I remember the terror on my mom's face when she realized that I wasn't being defiant when she told me to get up, I literally couldn't do it.

I've worried about my weight for as long as I can remember. My mom tells a story that when I was 3 years old, I looked up at her and asked, "Mommy, am I fat?" Who knows where I heard that. I got in trouble once when I was little, for calling my preschool teacher fat, too. Once I started taking ballet and getting really serious about it, I went to a summer-long intensive training camp, and was told (at age 13) that I should watch what I was eating, or my partner would continue to drop me. I was 5'7" and very thin. Looking back now, I realize that the fault was with my dance teacher-- for, rather than partnering me with an older boy who could match me for height and therefore support my body during lifts better, she put me with a boy my own age, who was a good few inches shorter than I.

I firmly recall that summer beginning my full-on obsession. We never had a scale in the house, so that really wasn't an option, but I started trying to "pinch" fat on my body, looking for things that were wrong. It really was a slow descent, because it took about a year before I was really in a physically dangerous place, but it seemed to be an eternity of counting how many Saltine crackers I ate a day, rationing out how much I could eat at dinner and "get away with," wearing bigger clothes so that people would stop commenting on how skinny I was (it only made me angry, because I never agreed).

Finally, though, I had been busted. It was a relief in some way, going through admissions. People realized, "Ashley has a Problem." But then came my wake-up call. There's nothing like being diagnosed with a problem with a capital "P" and tossed into a hospital, put on suicide watch for the first 48 hours (just in case), and locked up with people who had no idea what it was like to deal with your particular issue (I was placed in a general in-patient treatment center, where they not only had no specialty in dealing with eating disorders, they had never dealt with something like this before). Here I was, this half-starved little homeschooled girl who didn't even have cable TV, sitting next to a girl who'd done so much extacy that she had no more spinal fluid, another who had taken a box cutter to her wrists (and the police officer who tried to contain her), a boy who had "anger problems" (to understate things), another who had a sexual addiction, etc., etc. To say that I received a crash course in even more destructive behavior would be a gross understatement.

Anyway, back to the chocolate pudding. All the doctors knew to do for me was to "make me eat." They'd give me these frozen chocolate shakes between every meal, and I had to finish them (or slip them to someone else) before I could leave the table in the center of the day room. How utterly humiliating, if you can imagine, being surrounded by people while you face your worst enemies-- food, and yourself. I strongly considered bulimia during my stay, but I just couldn't figure out how to get myself to actually throw up instead of just gagging and crying (still can't, by the way, I tried once or twice during morning sickness). So I just went through the motions for 6 weeks until I was considered "cured" (and medicated into a zombie-like state). When I got home, I not only had an arsenal of new ways to destroy myself (rebellion, self-mutilation, and some serious anxiety issues), but I knew all new ways of hiding everything from watchful eyes.

Eventually, I did hit a rock bottom on my own, seek better forms of help, and turn things around before I killed myself. I still struggle with my weight, and in times of severe stress, I have relapsed a time or two (okay, three, but who's counting). Who honestly knows if I will ever be totally "cured," but I know that I have reached a place now where I can be honest with myself and others when I'm struggling, encourage others when they start to veer towards dangerous waters that I have tread before, and, for the most part, I've stayed pretty level.

As a side note, I discovered while I was in basic training in 2007, that because of my love-hate affair with food and my body, I've permanently altered the composition of my bones. I was so malnourished for so long, that I now have a very low bone density and am highly prone to breaks and fractures-- with a very, very slow healing time (as evidenced by my medical discharge from the Army). It's a consequence that I will always have to bear, along with some complications I faced during my pregnancy that could have been avoided altogether.

All that from chocolate pudding. Who would have thought?