Deployment Stories: The unnoticed hero

When I married my husband, I didn’t know what I was getting into. Long work hours, frequent deployments and the Communication is not only long-distance, it is often less intimate and unreliable, especially with today’s technology, communication is not constant. All this, can add stress to our marriages and the family, but most damaging is the emotional distance that results from living separate lives at times.

Creating a community of spouses, that are welling to share their stories, from all over the world, who have experienced deployments or being away from their spouses for long periods of time, can read these stories and gain encouragement at the same time and feel inspired to tackle this ugly monster called, Deployment, together.

Here’s their story…

It was my husband’s very first underway. Newly married and newly expectant with a baby, we had just arrived in the area. The Navy kind of knocked the wind right out of us, starting my husband working harder than I’d ever seen him work. Dealing with a new area as a young wife and expectant mother, I was, admittedly, a little frazzled.

I don’t like it when my husband has to stay away. What wife does? I had just started to get used to sleeping with him beside me and now it was hard to get comfortable without him. That’s where I was on a hot and muggy Monday night: home alone, restless, just trying to get to sleep in an unfamiliar place.

But that’s when it happened. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large dark spot in the wall corner behind my nightstand. Curious, I peered at it through the darkness. It wasn’t until this blotch (I swear, it was the size of a silver dollar) moved that I realised I HAD A MASSIVE SPIDER TAKING UP OCCUPANCY IN MY BEDROOM! Now, I can deal with spider when they’re normal sizes. You know, the common house spider that makes lesser women (and men… you know who you are) squeal in terror. That’s not an issue for me. But I don’t really feel that way WHEN SHELOB IS ACTUALLY TWO FEET AWAY FROM MY FACE!

So like any completely normal person, I fled the bedroom and closed the door behind me, determined to sleep in the living room. The rational part of my mind knew that doors didn’t keep spiders at bay, but I’ll be honest and admit that I wasn’t really “thinking” at this point. Fight or flight instinct.

I texted my husband, asking him what I should do before remembering that he was out to sea and didn’t have cellphone service. I posted a plea to Facebook, asking my friends what I should do if there was a large, potentially dangerous spider invading my house. Unfortunately, my friends were a bunch of comedians. No, guys, burning down the apartment is never a good idea. I called my brother, hoping for some sage advice from the Boy Scout… who just told me to go in there and kill it. Yeah… like THAT’S going to happen!

At this point, I noticed a different spider on the floor in the living room, almost as large as the one that was in the bedroom. Surrounded by my enemy, I lost it and just started crying. I would love to blame the pregnancy hormones, but the truth is, I’m just really afraid of spiders. I called a non emergency police number.

“Hi, this is going to be an odd question. But do you know who I could call if I have a potentially dangerous spider in my house and I’m too panicked to kill it?”

The pissed off lady on the other end huffed and replied, “You’d have to call and extermination and they’re, like, all closed. And if this is a medical emergency, you have to call the hospital.”

AND THEN SHE HUNG UP ON ME!

Never had I felt so alone. As I stood on the coffee table (how else do you keep away from scary spiders?), I put out one more desperate phone call to the maintenance office at my apartment complex. God bless that poor, confused, young man who had to deal with the sobbing mess that was me on the phone as I begged him to come rescue me.

My hero, the maintenance man, arrived just in the nick of time. He squished the living room spider and I began to show him towards the bedroom where the other spider lurked.

“Oh hey, is that him?” he asked as we passed through the kitchen.

I looked and saw YET A THIRD SPIDER on the wall in my kitchen.

“No… that’s not. I didn’t even see that one.”

“Oh cool. Practice!”

The kitchen spider dealt with, we approached the bedroom. The maintenance hero frowned into the dark. “There’s a lot of stuff in this room, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to find it.”

I hovered in the doorway and pointed at the corner where I had last seen the beast. “He was in the corner there.”

“Well, they do tend to move pretty…. Whoa! Nope, here he is. Can you get me some paper towel? Actually hold on…”

He took off his boot, muttering that the spider was too big for paper towel, and squished it against the nightstand before cleaning it off.

“That sure was an ugly one. Don’t quote me on that, but that may have been a black widow. I’ve seen a couple of them around here before, but that was a little big. Still looked like it though.”

Sometimes our heroes don’t wear the military uniform. Sometimes they’re confused young adults who get panicked calls from freaked out pregnant ladies.

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