My Husband Keeps Leaving Me

A month after Andrew proposed to me, he and I went to couples counseling, where, in our first session, he said, “If I have to choose between you and the Army, I choose the Army.”

His words knocked the air out of my chest.

Five years earlier, on our first date, he had said (after a few too many drinks), “I’m going to marry you.”

“You’re out of your mind,” I replied.

Apparently he wasn’t. But by the time he proposed, he had been grappling with his desire to join the Army — and my desire for him not to — for two years. I was 27. He was 28. I knew this desire of his was so strong some might say it was a calling. But it wasn’t until he made his blunt declaration in the therapist’s office that I understood the magnitude of his conviction.

I had been raised a pacifist. I had marched against the war in Iraq and was opposed to our involvement in the war in Afghanistan in the way of much of my generation, which is to say, vaguely and comfortably. I didn’t want the man I loved to fight in Afghanistan or any war. I didn’t want to leave New York City for wherever the Army decided to send him, quit the editing job I’d worked so hard to get, or leave my friends.

Well, we just celebrated 12 years of marriage and have two children, a boy, 5, and a girl, 7. So yes, in the end, I relented.

Over the course of our marriage, Andrew has deployed seven times and left on more long trainings than I can count. We moved from New York to Georgia to Washington State. He has missed birthdays, Christmases, anniversaries, emergency room visits, and four months of Covid isolation with two children under 4.

Every few months, my husband jumps out of planes for work, usually at night. He’s used to these jumps, but there is something almost primally wrong, he says, about stepping off the edge of a plane into darkness.

I know just what he means. That’s how I feel sending him off every time.

Through much of it, I have kicked and screamed, failing to master that paradoxical attitude of the most seasoned Army spouses I have met — acquiescent yet fiercely independent, community-building, tough. Whatever comes up, they handle it.

While I have not always accepted my role as Army wife, I have accepted Andrew’s role. Before anything else, he is a soldier. At times, this has been a painful truth for me to live with and acknowledge, yet, like any certainty, it’s comforting in its clarity, a lighthouse in this stormy life. For him, the call to combat is, if not stronger than the pull toward home, at least equal to it. That is an inviolable truth.

Or so I thought. The thing no one tells you about marriage is that its truths are slippery.

When the war in Afghanistan ended and we transitioned into a more routine family life, I had missed Andrew for so long that the missing had begun to run dry. I realized that I had felt abandoned for years, maybe ever since he had made that stark declaration in the therapist’s office. And he had missed so much at home, he wasn’t sure where his place was. I wanted him to find it, though.

Luckily, he did. He was ravenous for time with me and the children, hungry for the certainty and comfort of home life, cooking us elaborate meals, taking the children on Saturday adventures, reading every email from the school before I even had a chance. He had always loved us fiercely, and had been an excellent father, but now his center of gravity was inside our home, and when he left on trainings, the invisible threads that connected us as a family felt tightly woven in a new way.

There had been times, in his many absences, that I had felt like we were living a facsimile of a marriage, trading the ocean for the faint sound of it through the spiral of a seashell. But now, finally, we had the real thing. We had the ocean.

Two years passed without a deployment. Then, one night, Andrew and I went out to a steak dinner, a rare occasion. We were drinking cocktails and smiling dopily at each other when Andrew’s phone rang. I heard his voice change, and I knew. When he hung up, I waited for the faint but detectable shift in his body language, the tension in his jaw, the new distance in his normally soft and attentive gaze.

My husband is expert at compartmentalization, able to switch from dinner out to packing for a deployment with a startling quickness, leaving, in some sense, before we’ve even had the chance to say goodbye. But he surprised me this time: When he laid his hand over mine on the white tablecloth, I could sense a pull toward home that was greater than his pull away.

And maybe because every action has an equal and opposite reaction, I didn’t curse the Army or even allow my mood to plummet. When he told me that he would soon be heading to an undisclosed location for an indeterminate amount of time and didn’t know when he would be able to call or write, tears sprang to my eyes, then quickly disappeared.

That was the extent of my kicking and screaming. This wasn’t quite a reversal of roles, but it was a slipping of that inviolable truth. I had, perhaps, finally become a seasoned Army wife, just as he had become a family man.

A week after Andrew left, our 5-year-old told me he thought Daddy was dead. My daughter turned 7, and the night of her birthday party, cried herself to sleep.

“Can we please call Daddy?” she begged.

“I would if I could,” I said.

But, still, I didn’t kick or scream. I cried during therapy once a week, but the rest of the time, I worried about my children.

When we finally heard from Andrew, I could hear it in his voice immediately, an aching tug. He wanted so badly to be with us, much more than he wanted to be there.

Somewhat miraculously, he came home earlier than expected, and when he did, he gave me a notebook of letters he had written to us when we couldn’t talk. It was such a joy to have him home, it took me a week to even look at the notebook.

When I finally read the letters, I wept in a way I hadn’t since his early deployments. Not being able to call us had tortured him, filled him with guilt and anguish and rage. For years, I had struggled to find a way to build a bridge across the chasm of our experiences. I imagine this struggle is at the heart of a lot of couples’ challenges, because marriage is a union of two different lives: Do you see me? Do you hear me? Can you feel what I feel?

In the journal’s pages, I recognized what I had felt for so long, what my daughter was beginning to express: a profound helplessness. The echoes of kicks and screams that no one can hear. The Army tells you what to do and you do it. It made my whole body hurt to realize that he had been alone with that pain. It hurt, too, to realize how alone I had been with mine.

The thing is, it wasn’t just the deployments that wrought distance between us. The roles I cast for us early on had held a kind of hypnotic power over us, kept us from fully seeing each other. Andrew is a soldier, but he has always been a family man. And I may not have wanted him to join the Army, but I am proud of what he’s accomplished, have supported his dream, and am, it turns out, pretty damn tough.

I think sometimes that we clung to our assumed roles to bear the head-spinning uncertainty of our lives: the successive deployments and the dangers of combat, but also the beautifully absurd gesture of building a family, this reliable little enterprise of love and comfort that could be taken from us at any time.

“I feel like I’ve woken up from a dream,” Andrew said to me recently.

I feel the same.

We lost sight of each other the way any married couple can, and now, 12 years in, it feels like we are waking up to each other anew. After all, if we cast the roles in our marriage, then it’s in our power to change or abandon them. We have had many homecomings over the years, but this, by far, has been the sweetest one.