A vent

Warning:  This is a vent.

I knew Mark would be busy here, but this is getting to be a bit ridiculous.  He goes in to work, usually around 6-7am on a normal week (aka, not a night week) and usually isn’t home until 7-8pm at night.  And 95% of the time he’s at work, he’s completely unreachable because he’s flying or he’s in the vault, where he can’t have his cell phone.  On night weeks he goes in around 9-10am usually and sometimes isn’t home until after midnight.  And I have a feeling this is just going to get worse because he thinks his job, when he’s done with MQT (mission qualification training) is going to be in the scheduling office.  I don’t know much about that besides they obviously build the schedule for everyone, which constantly has to be changed and updated and the schedule depends on about a million different things, but I know my friends here have all complained about when their husbands were the schedulers and how they were never home.  Great.  He’s already never home.  And he’s really going to be “never home” when he goes to Sweden for 2 weeks at the end of July.  And then after that he’s going back to the States for 6 weeks from the end of Sept – November.

I hate being alone when he’s gone.  I hate having to raise a child by myself.  I hate having the dates that he’s leaving always in the back of my mind and wishing they were further away.  I hate that he’s deploying early next year and I really have no clue when he’s leaving or when he’s coming back for that one.  I just know he’s going to be gone at least 5 months, and that’s a really, really long time.

Abbie’s been super clingy to me lately.  If she’s awake, she wants to be in my lap, or climbing on me, and it’s exhausting.  I can’t get anything done because she really won’t entertain herself for more than 5 mins at a time right now.  And she hasn’t been napping well lately either.  I feel like I have absolutely no time to myself, except for the hour that Mark is home before Abbie goes to bed, when I usually retreat to someplace they’re not while he entertains her.  And soon even that “me time” is going to be gone because Mark won’t be here and I’ll be flying solo.  I had huge hopes of learning Italian and doing a bunch of quilting once we moved here, and I haven’t even plugged my sewing machine in because Abbie won’t leave me alone long enough for me to do it, let alone actually sew.  And the internet doesn’t work well enough for me to use the online language learning programs.

This military lifestyle just sucks sometimes.  It’s great for the places you live and the people you meet, but it’s really hard when the guys are gone so much and you have to do everything yourself, with no break, for months at a time.

And added to this all, our damn internet doesn’t work 85% of the time, which is beyond frustrating.  It works enough for me to see I have emails, but if I try to open them, it goes offline.  Grrr..  Mark ordered a new router and I hope to God that fixes the problem.

Anyway, that’s my vent for the month.  I feel a little better now, but not much.