Blurry and Out of Focus

Tomorrow will be 3 months since my husband returned from the Sandbox. It's hard to believe that 90 days has gone by since deployment was officially over and the emptiness of a year apart began to vanish. We were able to come back to our life rather effortlessly, but with a great deal more passion and thirst for our life and marriage than ever before (and I'm not just talking about sex here...although...).

As I look back over the 3 months I see how far we have come and how much we've changed yet stayed the same. There are subtle things, like erratic sleeping patterns, a little hypervigilence, mental and physical exhaustion, loss of concentration, lack of motivation - for both of us. The second month of return we spent traveling and just 'doing'...while working at the same time. We gave caution to the wind when it came to working out and eating healthy (and having a few drinks more during the week than 'normal'). We loved and laughed more than ever dreamed possible and had a great time. Month 3 began on the heels of the Alabama tornadoes and the devastation in our area and neighborhood. We became discombobulated for a few weeks. We just felt like we couldn't get our footing.

Yesterday at lunch my husband told me that he feels like he's lost his edge...his mo-jo..his focus. He's having a difficult time grasping and organizing himself following deployment and just getting back into his pre-deployment groove at work (and on the golf course - yes, I've noticed Babe). This was something I totally understood because I have felt the same way about myself. We seem to be living in 3 worlds right now: pre-deployment, deployment and post-deployment ~ each world overlapping the other but not one becoming more dominate yet. 

Before deployment we had a groove and routine in our personal and professional lives. We rocked and rolled along and were at the top of our game. Then deployment came along and our weeble began to wobble..just spinning, until we were able to learn a new world's balance. For little more than a year he lived and adapted to not only a new 'normal' but a new country where war was happening. I transitioned to a life that was sad (grieving the loss of my parents and my husband), it was certainly lonely, and sleepless. We both had new responsibilities to deal with and had expectations placed on us to keep it together, keep going, head-up, don't cry, stay busy. We adjusted.

I thought long and hard about the conversation I had with my husband yesterday. This morning at the gym (which I had not been to seriously since he came home), about how I feel just like him. Disorganized, out of focus, like I can't get my groove back. By this I mean the groove and pace we had while he was deployed. We had adapted to that pace and now it's gone. Here we are in the post-deployment life and we are trying to find that fit within our surroundings again. Our relationship has never been stronger - that's not what I'm talking about here - it's the living part that seems hazy. How do we we get our focus back? How long will we feel like together we are just floating along waiting to be tethered to something familiar again.

We were both content to say that we weren't impacted by deployment, that we were able to just jump right back into our old life and keep on going without skipping a beat. In truth, we've been about 80% successful in doing that. It's the other 20% that is a struggle. The 'old' life was replaced with deployment, deployment was replaced by 'now'. How do we make sense of those 3 existences and make them One again?