When You Can’t Talk With Your Spouse
30 days. 30 long days. That was the longest my husband and I have gone without talking during a deployment. No emails. No calls. No Facetime. I knew he was okay. I knew this because “no news is good news” and I just had to believe it.
Although that was the longest we had to go, thank goodness it was not the norm. The norm was every 3-4 days. Thinking about that now seems a little strange but that was our reality at one time.
During deployments and other training, it might not be possible to talk with your spouse.
You might have to go a few days, a few weeks, and in some cases a few months without speaking. This can be frustrating for the spouse at home because we really have no control over this. There can be many different reasons why you can’t speak with your spouse regularly. From them not being allowed to talk to you or having a spouse that isn’t as communicative as he should be.
I have heard people complain that their spouse calls them too much and I can see that too. If you are talking too much it can be hard to live your life.
In my perfect world, my husband would call me every three days and we would talk for one whole hour on a perfect phone connection.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen too often. Sometimes when he called I could barely understand him because the connection is bad. Other times he was only able to talk for five minutes. The feeling I got when I picked up the phone and hear my husband say, “Hey, it’s me” was so wonderful. Time stops and everything is right again. At least for the moment.
I also try to remember that a deployment is just made up of days. As each day passes we get closer to homecoming. Once homecoming happens, I can talk to him pretty much whenever I want to again. Deployments are just a short period of time we have to go through where we can’t be with each other and communicate like a normal married couple. This won’t last forever.
When I really needed him and couldn’t talk with him, I would get upset. One of the hardest things for me was not being able to have access to him when I really need to talk.
Married couples are supposed to be able to talk to each other on a regular basis. Sometimes deployments make that hard to do.
One thing I did that helped the situation was to write him letters. Even if I didn’t send them. Even if he wasn’t going to read them for a while. I wrote them. I found this so helpful. I was able to tell him about our day, what the boys were doing, and anything that was on my mind.
Because of communication issues during our first deployment, I had to make a lot of decisions by myself. I had to decide what to do about my son and his speech issues. I had to make decisions about childcare and what to do each day with the kids. I got into the habit of making all these decisions myself. I had to. I couldn’t wait for him to make the decisions while he was in Iraq.
That lack of communication hurts. Not being able to get input on something important is difficult. You have to do the best you can. You have to figure out what will work and how you two can work through anything that might come up while he is away.
