Wife of a Sailor

God help me. I’m so tired. I need my sleep. I make no bones about it. I need eight hours a day, and at least ten at night…
~Bill Hicks

That’s how I feel right now.  I could sleep for hours just to get up and do it again.  I just don’t know how much longer I can do this anymore. And no, I’m not ill.

Huzzy and I started sleeping on air mattresses when the movers came to PCS our stuff and packed up our mattresses

Yeah, this is how I feel. Every. Minute. Of. The. Day.

and everything but some clothes, a few pots and pans, a TV and one broken old couch.  That means, I have not slept on a mattress for more than two months now. Huzzy got a few nights in a hotel on his way to Washington to his new duty station but other than that, air mattresses are what we’ve been dealing with.

We have also found out that air mattresses (or at least ours) will not hold their air after about a month of nightly use.  Huzzy’s went first (though it did survive the 2,600 mile trek westward) and my started having problems slightly afterward.  I’m at the point where I fill it full just before bed and then wake up at about 4 a.m. with excruciating back pain only to find that the mattress has deflated enough that it needs to be filled again before I can sleep and my back gets some rest.

So that’s how it’s been going. Until Friday night, when a mass of severe storms rolled through producing three tornadoes within a 20 mile distance from my house.  Electricity went out about 9:30 p.m. just as I was taking the dogs out for their last walk.  I’m sure it was  a sight to see me outside yelling for the dogs to hurry, hurry, hurry because the lightning started getting close again and I could only imagine the next day’s headlines “Woman struck by lightning for holding flashlight while getting dogs to poop in a strong storm.”

Anyway, so the storm went out and I was left with no way to inflate the mattress (no, I couldn’t do it the old-fashioned way by using my lung power, either). So I did the only thing I could… I took the cushions off the couch and put them in the bedroom to sleep on. The dogs were miserable and so was I.  If you take one fuzzy dog that pants at 65 degrees, put him in a house that is stifling at 80+ degrees with no way to ventilate because of a ranging storm and have no way of placing fans on him (which is the only way he sleeps soundly) because the power is out and you have my Friday night.

After listening to Skah pant for an hour, I decided to take my couch cushions and sleep on the couch.  After an hour of listening to him pace and pant over the gate I put across the bedroom (a heavily panting dog with hardwood floors and no furniture makes a HORRIBLE echo… it was even louder than when I was in the room due to the echoing), I gave up the couch and took my cushions to the other side of the kitchen in the tiny family room.  It was there that I finally got some sleep…. at about 1:30 a.m. when I had to be up in less than five hours to go to work (second job).

But darned if I didn’t get better sleep there than I did on the air mattress… probably because I didn’t have to wake up a few hours before my alarm to turn on the light, fumble for the air pump and re-inflate the air mattress.  So I decided I wasn’t going to use the air mattress anymore.

I’m not sure which is better… sleeping on a full-sized air mattress where you have room to stretch out and move around but have to wake up in the middle of the night to re-inflate OR sleeping on couch cushions on the floor that don’t even give you room to turn over (ouch!) and will sometimes split apart where you fall down between them… but at least I can stretch out there too. Or is it the third option?

So I decided to try to compromise and last night I slept on the couch so I wouldn’t fall off the cushions and so I didn’t have to re-inflate everything. The dogs needed to be with me or I’d hear Skah’s panting and pacing again so I covered the entire floor with blankets and dog beds to stave off the “click-click” when they walk around during the night.

Downside? I can’t stretch out on the couch. My back is paying for it today. But I slept all night long and so did the dogs, so that was a plus.  I guess I can’t win either way.

Which goes into my next topic… I bought a plane ticket for Washington for the end of July because I expect to be drilling out there by then. I planned on just changing my ticket if my paperwork didn’t go through quick enough, but I really feel like the $400 plane ticket is worth it just to sleep in a hotel for five days.  Oh, and because I’d also be able to see Huzzy for the first time in 11 weeks.

HA! Who am I kidding? Seeing Huzzy is my #1 reason and the rest are all a very distant second.  I’m so excited! <insert happy dance here>  We’ll have been married 18 weeks by then and will have only been together for seven. It’s about darn time I see him before he has to deploy sometime this fall.

Since I bought the ticket on Sunday (or was it Saturday? I can’t remember), missing Huzzy has gotten worse. It was easier to deal with “eh, I’m not going to see him for a long time” than “I get to see him in <checks watch> four weeks and two days!” It’s so close that I find myself longing to be back in his arms.

When I didn’t know when I’d see him next, I could just shelve those emotions and say, “Eh, honey that’s not for a long time.” But now it’s within reach… he’s almost within reach.  And the wait is starting to become really hard. Any other military spouses out there feel the same way?  When seeing your spouse is so far away, you can deal with it better than as the time nears?