The “Deployment Curse” a term coined by military spouses across all branches of the military for everything that goes wrong when your spouse is away. In preparing to write this blog I decided to Google the term, I mean we (as in the spouses) use it all the time to explain why everything falls apart and hits the fan when we are left alone, to our own devices, to figure things out, it turns out that the spouses of Mildenhall aren’t the only ones to use this term. It doesn’t even really matter if it is a deployment, anytime your husband leaves for any amount of time you can expect things to go wrong. You just laugh, share stories with other wives, and the consensus is “You know that wouldn’t happen if (insert name here) wasn’t gone,” or “you know it wouldn’t have been this bad if he was home”. We don’t have children yet, but I am sure that adds a whole new dynamic to the “deployment curse” or “deployment gnome” as I read it referred to in some of my Google searches. Last deployment, from March thru May of this year, Hercules broke through our fence and attacked the neighbor’s rabbit, so if a dog can be hit by the “gnome” then I am sure children can be too. During my search I found “35 Crazy Deployment Curse Stories” and if you have the time you should read them as some of them are pretty hilarious:
35 Crazy
Deployment Curse Stories:
5 Things
Guaranteed to Happen During Deployment:
This list was
adapted from following link; click the link to read more as I have only used
the first bit of each line.
1.
An important appliance or electronic
device will explode.
(Literally explode or burn up in England…maybe not so much in the states). For
me this deployment it was my crockpot and boiler (okay my boiler didn’t blow up
or fully break…but it stopped working)
2.
Your kids will have moments where you
wonder if they were switched at birth.
As I said, no children yet, though my friends who have babies do talk about how
they stop sleeping through the night when dad leaves, so I guess this one
hasn’t happened to me…yet….unless you count Hercules and his occasional break
downs/barking at random hours of the night. He never does that when Sam is
home.
3.
At some point you will need a good car
mechanic, towing company, and/or locksmith. The day Sam left the “maintenance required” light came on
in the car…luckily that is an easy fix, however, the dent in the front of the
car…not so much as easy of a fix as a simple oil change.
4.
A rodent, reptile, or world-record
breaking insect will find itself inside your home. People talk about how huge the spiders
in England are…and I came in contact with the biggest one while Sam is away,
until then I didn’t know what people were talking about! I also had a wasp
problem in our loft…and I hate wasps.
5.
You realize you are much stronger,
braver, and more resilient than you ever realized. This is so true. Since this is Sam’s
second time of being deployed this year, I was expecting the curse…and it has
come in full force….worse than last time for sure….however, this time, though
it hasn’t always been easy, I have tried to find the blessings from God amongst
the curse and used it to bring me closer to him. I have found more strength in
myself than I ever knew I had (which I considered myself a strong person prior
to becoming a military spouse) but my strength and my hope lies within Christ,
without him I would be a mess all the time, but especially during deployment.
Which brings me to my most favorite verse in the Bible, one that I came to love
when I was 15, though I had been a Christian and accepted Christ into my heart
and life when I was 11, the age 15 is when I started to truly be tested and
that is when I discovered the following verse:
1 Peter 3:15 “But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give
an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you
have. But do this with gentleness and respect”
I
came to love this verse as a teenage because it reminded me that no matter how
hard life gets, or what difficult things life throws at us, as Christians, have
a hope and a future. That hope and future is eternity with our loving Lord and
Savior. I look at this verse in Peter as a reminder that even though life is
hard,
I have hope inside me, I have the Holy Spirit living in me and the
promise from him that this life doesn’t last forever, in fact it is but a small
spec in the realm of eternity and one day there will be no more tears or
suffering as all who believe will be at home, praising God.
I don’t know about you, but that gives
me unspeakable JOY when I think about it and I should always be ready to share
this hope, Jesus Christ, and his love with others. During the times we are
tested the most, like during deployments,
it is import to keep a good attitude and though we may be unhappy at
times, and life can make us that way, we are never un-joyful, we never lose our
Joy, because we never lose Jesus, he is with us every day. This deployment, as
the curse was hitting hard, I have been trying to find the blessings and it has
truly changed the way I look at situations
when I am looking for the blessing amongst the curse rather than
seeing all the problems.
It has truly been an amazing journey
and I have grown in my walk/trust with God. Here is a look at these deployment
curse/things gone wrong and the blessings I have found so far, though I am sure
there are more there.
Sam
left on 26 August, the first day of school and my first subbing job all came
the first week he left, but the first weekend he was gone was Labor Day
weekend, which was a four day weekend here. The first weekend they are gone is
always the hardest, for anyone, as that is when you spend the most time
together and suddenly your companion, best friend, is gone and you feel alone.
Since it was a four day weekend everyone had plans to travel, which is exactly
what I would’ve done if Sam was home.
I was feeling down, I was already sad he left and now I was going
to be ALL ALONE for an entire weekend…WOE IS ME…basically is how I felt.
Thankfully,
God loves me despite my sour attitude and he provided me a unique opportunity.
Friends of ours, from Bible Study, had to unexpectedly go back to the states,
but his sponsor parents from the Academy had already planned a trip to visit
them before. His sponsor parents still came and I was supposed to bring them
the car keys/house keys and in doing so I offered to show them around the local
area. Turns out they are wonderful people and it was such a blessing to me to
have something to do over the long weekend. I do enjoy playing tour guide and
the fact that the people I was touring around ended up being super sweet made
it so much better!
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| Meet Michael and Laurie, two very sweet people! And new adopted parents for me! You can never have too many parents and they definitely took care of me over Labor Day Weekend! |
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| Fun times in Bury |
The
deployment gnome reared its ugly head during the weekend. While I was driving
our friend’s car with their sponsor parents it began to smoke on us and
overheat. I have found many blessings with this, though I say it happened
because Sam was deployed. The first blessing, we were in Bury St. Edmunds at
the time and were able to walk to a car repair shop. Second blessing, we were
on our way to meet Taryn who lives in Bury so she was able to pick us up, we
still had tea and she drove us back to Mildenhall. Third blessing, if it hadn’t
of happened to us, it would’ve happened to my friend and her sweet baby, and so
it was better that it happened to us, with all the resources around, and we
were able to get it fixed before they came home.
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| Glad I could show them the local area that Erin and Mark live in! They enjoyed the Ely Cathedral and we hiked to the top, even with Laurie having had major hip surgery less than a year ago! |
A
few weeks later the deployment curse struck again. After a day full of subbing
I came home and started feeling sick. As the night wore on my temperature went
up and it became clear that I caught a stomach bug from the germy kids. I was
out of commission, on the couch for an entire week! I am the type of person who
likes to be taken care of when I am sick, and I hated not having Sam home to
take care of me. The blessing amongst
this curse is that I have amazing friends: Taryn, Meleah, and
Luke…especially Meleah who took me to the doctor and kept bringing me food, so
I didn’t have to leave the couch.
The second blessing is that it wasn’t food poisoning and I didn’t
end up having to be hospitalized so that is a HUGE blessing!
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| This is Meleah who took good care of me during my illness and even made me dinner in my own house! |
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| This is the meal Taryn made for me, in my own house again, and the first real meal I ate after being sick for a week! It was amazing! |
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| Taryn also had me over for dinner at her house and made this yummy meal...I wish she could cook for me all the time! |
While I am on the
subject of personal health, during this deployment I had to go in for a biopsy
of a mole on my neck. It is something that been on my neck since July and
thanks to a great friend, who literally had to drag me to the doctor, turns out
they were concerned it could be melanoma. Thankfully, it was just my skin over
healing itself and not melanoma!
So the blessing is that the biopsy results came back negative for skin cancer and
that it was also removed and won’t come back!
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| The deployment hasn't all been about curses!I also found lots of time to do fun things with friends, like take off to London for the day with my sweet friend Kim. Bonus, she is pregnant so we always got a seat on the tube! |
Moving on to
cars…Not even joking the DAY Sam left our maintenance required light came on,
but being a military spouse, I do know a little bit about cars, since I am the
one who does the up keep on them. Anyway, the maintenance required light simply
means it needs an oil change or some other routine maintenance, the check
engine light is the one you need to worry about!
The blessing here is
that while your spouse is deployed you get a voucher for an oil change
which pays for
most of it! However, you are only allowed two vouchers a year, so let’s hope
Sam doesn’t leave again in 2013. Continuing on the subject of cars, I dented my
front bumper on the Honda whilst pulling out of our driving by hitting the
fence. I was impatient and it’s a tight fit, I would really like to blame the
deployment curse for this one, but those readers who know me well and know my
track record with this car and stationary objects…well you know that I lack a
little thing called depth perception. I
am still sorting through this mishap but thankfully it is just a plastic bumper
and the blessing here is that the fence wasn’t damaged.
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| Since the end of August I have been substitute teaching, which is great! I have had lots of jobs, but I have also had lots of mornings where I get up at 6:30am, get ready and don't get called to work, so I enjoy some tea before heading to the gym. |
Last weekend we
had another four day weekend. Again, everyone took off on really cool trips,
which is what Sam and I would’ve done too. I had worked the whole week, so I
spent Friday playing catch up. I took the car to get its oil changed and walked
to the other side of base, to go to the gym/shower because my hot water was out
at the house. Of course the gym close to the car shop was closed, so it took me
one hour to walk to the other gym across from Sam’s squadron. Boy did that hot
shower feel nice! My original plan was to pop into Sam’s squad and ask someone
for a ride back to the other side of base, to save an hour walk back to pick up
my car; however, since it was a four day weekend they weren’t working. It was
raining when I got done showering and I didn’t want to walk, so
I prayed for courage
(I am not good at asking for help) and I asked a pregnant military lady for a
ride in the locker room.
She was security
forces and heading to the other side of base anyway, so it worked out.
Sometimes we have to seek out the blessing. God puts people and things in our
path all the time, in this case the locker room which could’ve been empty, but
we can’t expect the blessing to always come to us.
We must always be
looking for the answer to our prayers, especially because it may come in a way
we weren’t expecting or we may get a different answer, but God is faithful.
Fall has hit in
full force here in England and I love it! However, there have been some rainy
cold days and when the weather turned and we no longer had seventy degree days,
I turned on our heat. We have a boiler and oil heating, so when I turned on the
heat it requires more pressure than hot water so I pressure dropped. A blessing
here is that it was a slow drop during a week that I had a subbing job every
day, I didn’t officially lose my heat or hot water until Thursday night and I
knew the problem was that it needed to be re-pressurized, but I didn’t know how
to fix it. I was determined to figure out how to fix it and after having a
really productive day, I was feeling empowered. Sam has re-pressurized before
so he could tell me it was some screw under the sink, so I turned them all.
Eventually, thank you to Google, which had pictures, I found the right one.
However, I re-pressurized it too much and was at risk of overheating the
boiler, so I had to “bleed the radiators”, which is something I learned from
the nice man on the phone, when I called the number on the boiler. I set out to
the hardware store because you need a key to bleed to radiators. Hercules, my
partner in crime, came along for the ride. I got the part I needed, turned to Google/YouTube
and bled our radiators. I also accidently turned off the cold water supply to
our bathroom and the kitchen sink water, but I did figure out how to turn the
kitchen sink water back on, but not the one to our bathroom and there were no Google
videos for that. This whole experience was a blessing, I got heat and hot water
working before my SIL came to visit, I learned a lot about British boilers so I
will know next time when something goes wrong, how to fix it; finally the
biggest blessing of all was that all the resources I needed were available and
open to me. Over the four day weekend my SIL, Rachel, came to visit and that
was a HUGE blessing, again because it was a long weekend, everyone was gone and
we had a blast!
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| My partner in crime! |
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| Homemade butternut squash soup, yum! |
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| We had so much fun! |
Rachel headed back
on Monday and I had to work on Tuesday of this week. When I woke up on Tuesday
our “lock out” light was on. This is a light on the boiler and it isn’t good,
basically means something is wrong and your boiler shut itself off. You see how
this deployment curse term gets coined? This didn’t happen when Rachel was
here, thankfully, but the deployment gnome isn’t out to test her! Anyway, our
gardener/property manager, Mark, is amazing. He came by while I was at work and
spent the whole day trying to figure out what was wrong. Turns out, we ran out
of oil! I felt so bad that he worked hard to try and find a solution and I had
told him we had oil, so he didn’t even check that…which our oil gauge was
showing that we had half a tank, so Mark said there was no way I would’ve
known, he found out by actually opening up the tank to look in. Anyway, running
out of oil is pretty bad, because all of our lines were sucking up air instead of
oil. In order to correct this problem you have to “bleed the oil lines”, which
is out of my skill level. I ordered oil,
from two different companies, so that Mark would be there to bleed the lines.
However, like a true Brit, they didn’t deliver when they said they would so I
had to spend an extra day without heat or hot water. I also had to juggle all
this, making phone calls, etc. while working every day last week, and by
Thursday it was all over with, luckily. The blessing here is pretty obvious and
that is our house manager, gardener, and fix-it man, Mark. He is former RAF,
Royal Air Force, and so he understands deployments and he went over and beyond
what he is paid to do in order to help me out. I made sure to thank him with
apple pie and apple crisp though!
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| My first attempt at an apple pie...since then I have made apple butter and another apple pie....Rachel has made an apple crisp...I love having an apple tree |
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| Apples from our tree...Hercules likes them too! |
Everyone faces
their own challenges and God never promises us that this life will be easy. In
fact, he does quite the opposite in the Bible when he describes the evils of
this worldly life, but that is where our faith comes in and the hope that
Heaven is our eternal home. God does promise us though and it is evident
throughout the entire Bible that he is always with us and never leaves us. During
Sam’s first deployment I was introduced to a book called “Faith Deployed’,
which I highly recommend to anyone facing a deployment, and one of the entries
talked about making God your deployment husband, which is something I have
never considered before.
I have looked to God
as my father and God as my friend, so why not look to him as my husband?
When our spouses
are deployed they are on orders, carryout a mission that has been given to them
and they must focus on this mission at hand. Sometimes that means not being
able to talk to your spouse for days, weeks or even, in some cases, months. You
and your spouse were bounded together in love by God, they are you confidant,
your support, the person you turn to and when that person is fulfilling their
duty to our country, we do not have the same access to them. Causing many
spouses to feel alone and that is when we should turn to our deployment
husband, God. Crying out to him and looking for comfort among his love letter
to us. For those of my readers who aren’t military spouses, even you may find
yourself without your partner by your side at some point in life and I
challenge you to look for the blessing among the curse as well. The bible tells
us in
1 Thessalonians 5 to
give thanks, verse 18: “In everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for
you in Christ Jesus.”
I have so many
things I am thankful for from this deployment, but the biggest thing I am
thankful for is a loving God that has always provided me with the help I needed
along the way and the strength to make it through!
Thank you for
reading!
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| This is the moment you long for...that one hug, when the deployment is all over and you have conquered all the problems, everything is right in the world again, because he is home! This is my sweet friend, Taryn and her hubby Steve. This is their reunion after a 6 month separation. They are a strong and Godly couple, one that I admire! I am especially thankful for Taryn's friendship. Also, talk about a strong military spouse...they don't come much tougher than her! |
Excellent :) Needed to read this. Great perspective.
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