This is Chapter 7 in the Wellness Memoir. Catch up here.
When the deployment and surgeries were finally over, I faced a new chapter: recovery, reintegration and finding balance again. The lessons I learned about my health required me to change my habits. After 12 months apart, my husband and I had each been on separate journeys while also staying united through the long separation of deployment. We came back together as two changed people.
I was so excited for my husband to come home. His return had been the goal I was living to reach. However, during his absence, I felt like I had lived an entirely different life. I worried about how to be the person he knew while staying true to the person I had become during those 12 months apart.
That year of deployment taught me so much about the depth of my strength, my coping abilities and my adaptability. There were countless moments when I broke down under the weight of daily stress, crying and questioning how I would make it through. By the end of the deployment, I felt like I had truly grown into an adult. But that growth didn’t happen together with him; it happened in separate spaces.
When my husband returned, it was late in the evening after multiple delays. We—the waiting families—had been gathered at the designated building on base since the afternoon. Hours passed, with many of us juggling babies and toddlers, waiting anxiously for our Marines to come home.
In my naïve thoughts, I believed that once my husband walked through the door, we’d somehow know how to start over, hand-in-hand and step-in-step. Reintegration challenges didn’t even cross my mind. I wasn’t prepared for the reality of coming back together.
The Healing After Deployment
The healing process began immediately, and my son was the first to show me just how much healing we needed.
When my husband came home, our toddler was surprised. He had been just six months old when my husband left, and now he was 18 months old. The brief two weeks of R&R we had shared during the deployment weren’t enough to leave a lasting impression on our baby’s memory.
The first time my husband hugged me after we arrived home, my son started wailing and ran to me in fear. He didn’t recognize the situation—this was his dad, but to him, it was a stranger.
For nearly a year, my son reacted this way. It took time for him to realize that my husband was safe and part of our family. His adjustment period wasn’t something I had anticipated. But each time my son reacted, we reassured him. Slowly but surely, he learned that his dad was a safe and loving presence in his life.
Marriage Regrowth
Our marriage also needed time to heal. The deployment had changed both of us.
I had worked on our marriage during the deployment, but that work was done on my own. It was personal growth that kept me focused on reunification and maintaining a positive outcome. My husband and I returned to each other as two different people who still carried elements of who we were before the deployment. We had to relearn each other.
Healing meant accepting each other’s growth and committing to rebuild our relationship. It wasn’t easy, but we chose to work through the challenges of reintegration. Even decades later, those challenges occasionally resurface, shaped by the long separation, my surgeries, a car accident, and my time parenting alone.
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
The light at the end of the tunnel, which I mentioned in Part 2, was finally glowing brightly. It illuminated not just the end of a difficult chapter but also the beginning of the next phase of growth for our marriage.
We’d be tested again with a future deployment. But this time, we were better equipped to grow separately and find our way back to each other.