Reintegration
Remember the saying about how long it takes to get over a break up? What is it, something like divide the time you were together in two? So, if you were dating for a year, it should take about six months to get over the person.
Wouldn’t it be nice if life worked that way? Well, realistically, anyone who has been through a bad break up knows that these equations just don’t work.
What if we applied the same equation to a deployment? It should have taken three months for things to be back to normal after my wife got home, right? Not so much.
It’s funny, you know. People talk about the “new normal” after a deployment. Military families are taught about the adjustments and sacrifices that everyone makes during a deployment. We talk about how to make that “reintegration period” smoother.
Even with my counseling background and knowledge about how people grow and change over time, I can’t say that I was fully prepared for the changes we’ve been through since my wife deployed. Yes, it’s true that there is some readjustment back to daily life. Things like walking the dogs, taking out the trash, and cooking are all a bit different. Yes, that is a change that happens during a deployment. But the reality is that this deployment changed each of us – and it changed “us.”
I consider myself a pretty patient person. I am a good listener, and I take the time to support the people I love. But my level of patience deteriorated while Sue was deployed. It became a chore for me to listen to people complain about mundane things. Didn’t they know that I was worried about the love of my life being hurt or killed? How could they complain about traffic or have a long, deep conversation about reality T.V.? Some of that has subsided since she came home, but some of it has not. And perhaps the hardest part of that for me is that I was completely unaware it was happening. I didn’t realize that my patience was waning and my anger was rising.
Susan has had trouble adjusting home with regard to patience as well. It’s difficult to come home and have people assume that things are just going to go back to normal. It’s challenging to go back to a civilian desk job after your mind and body have been going 100 m.p.h. for so long. It’s hard to trust the people at your civilian job to have your back, the way your military comrades do, when in all reality they often don’t. It’s hard to have patience with people as they ask awkward questions about your deployment or, perhaps even more difficult, when they don’t.
It has been four months since Susan got home from her deployment. We are still in the “reintegration phase.” Sometimes I wonder what things will look like down the road. Will I ever fully regain my patience? Will she readjust to work? Will the people around us ever fully understand what we’ve been through?
I’m unsure of many of those answers. What I am sure of, though, is that I am thankful to have a different perspective when I am stuck in traffic or get the wrong coffee in my order – this deployment helped with that. I am sure that the level of connection and camaraderie that Susan felt during her deployment is possible in the civilian world, if only we have people like her to help make it so. And, finally, I am sure that the people in our life who love and care about us just want to understand. They want to know how we got through such a challenging time, and how we continue to learn and grow from it.
To be honest, I want to understand too.
Freedom Is a Funny Word
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I doubt that any concept has greater currency among Americans than “freedom” and its synonym, “liberty.” It is prominent in the Pledge of Allegiance, which ensures justice and liberty for all; in the Star Spangled Banner, which characterizes the United States as a “land of the free and home of the brave”; and in the words of practically every politician, as they pay lip service to the concept while vying for public office or promoting legislation.
Laughing into New Life (Excerpt)
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Being in the tomb doesn’t mean there is an absence of life, but, rather, the dominance of death.
I see the tomb present in so many of our lives all the time. The longing to be partnered and have children as a still single 35 year old can consume us, suck all the air out of the room. And we are obsessed, all other lights are shut out, we are, in other words, “entombed.”
The Flying Trapeze and the Fine Art of Freedom (Excerpt)
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I’ve attended the circus exactly three times in my life—twice as a child and once as an adult. The first two were the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey circus (under the big-top, the “Greatest Show on Earth”) and the third was Cirque de Soleil, held in an auditorium theater.
Carrying the Language of Freedom
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This year what has taken hold of me about Passover is not so much the story itself, but the very fact that the story is reliably told and retold, generation after generation, at the family Seder. The story is a fundamental part of the language of a people. It provides the basis for religious identity, and helps to preserve the community, sustaining an enduring culture and tradition.
From Your Minister
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In the early 1990s I interned in the Church of the United Community, a tiny storefront congregation in the Marcus Garvey Center in Roxbury, Massachusetts, triple yoked between the United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, and Unitarian Universalists.
Many in the congregation had been through drug treatment. More had been to jail, at a time when crack cocaine was plentiful and arrests of young black men more plentiful still. Many had contracted “the virus,” as AIDS was called there.
REsources for Living
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The Passover story is, of course, a story about freedom. It’s the story of how the Israelites went from being slaves in Egypt to being free people with a land and a religion of their own. But I wonder when exactly in the story it is that the Hebrew people finally become free.
From “For Memory”
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Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark—
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.
Excerpted from “For Memory” by Adrienne Rich, published in 1981by W. W. Norton & Company in her book of poetry A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far.
Duty and Service
My name is Dave Thut. I am an orthopaedic surgeon. I have been a member of five UU churches over the past 20 years. I am a healer, a pacifist—and a veteran. Read more →
A God We Can Believe In
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At home on a bookshelf we have a massive folio-style slipcover book titled Cabinet of Natural Curiosities by Albertus Seba, a pharmacist in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. In 1731, after decades of collecting strange and exotic plants, snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, insects and butterflies, as well as a few fantastic beasts, such as a hydra and a dragon, Seba published an illustrated catalog of these curiosities. It’s an amazing display of biodiversity—enough to make anyone curious about why things change and how the same species can vary so much from one specimen to another.
