Les will have been out of town for 6 weeks when he finally gets back to Raleigh next weekend. I have felt guilty that I haven't felt more pining. More "missing". When I was in Atlanta for work for 4 days last month, I missed him terribly. I was upset that I was eating great food and visiting the incredible aquarium and relaxing with dear old friends. It just killed me that he wasn't with me to eat, to stare in slack-jawed wonder, to hear tall tales of my 15-years-ago-life.
But now I'm here in Raleigh, just going to work, walking Auggie, going to movies, and eating what I want, going to sleep when I want, making the bed every day. He's using his parents' house in Illinois as a home base while he drives innumerable miles for interviews in the Midwest and Northeast. He's hunkered down prepping, writing, outlining, rehearsing lectures, and preparing syllabi for classes he may never teach for schools we had never heard of until 2 months ago.
He'll be back next week. This round of interviews will be over, his dissertation will have been defended, his thousands of miles of driving will wind him up right back here in Raleigh, NC.
This separation has been, in all honesty, not that hard. He's not deployed. He's not having guns fired at him or seeing jeeps blow up or anything like that. He's not alone, and he's certainly not bored. Neither am I.
But here's what I have learned about marriage in this 5 week season of living alone. The reason it sucks to be apart for so long is not because we cannot handle the strain of not being together. It's not because we miss each other so terribly that we are just wallowing in misery and despair. It sucks to be apart from Les for a month and a half because somehow, miraculously and mysteriously, in the 2 years and 11 months that we have been married we have become a unit. "I" and "me" really have, for all intents and purposes, become "we". When I go to church without him, I feel lopsided. When I go out and come back and he's not sitting at the table, clicking away furiously at the computer, something is missing. The mundane routines of life had to be adjusted to make up for the missing half of my family - all the dog walks, all the garbage taking out, all the grocery shopping, cooking, TV watching, dinners with friends, morning and evening routines, even what time I go to and come home from work. Everything.
I can do that stuff. I was single for a long time. But I've never actually lived alone. This is the longest I have ever gone in a home by myself (Auggie is with me, of course, and that helps tremendously). And even though I know I could get used to it if I had to, I don't like it.
Not in a cheesy "You complete me" sense, but in a very real and awesome sense, Les and I are a unit. The food package notice "This unit not labelled for individual sale" just popped into my head. It's like that. We're a package deal now, and not intended for individual homes, or futures, or lives.
Which could make things very very complicated if he IS offered a fellowship job at a school far away. Would I really quit my job and move to PA for 9 months, and then we find ourselves both jobless next May? Couldn't we carefully map out a long distance year of visits and vacations? Do practical considerations outweigh our Unitness? I'm confident that we'll know the answer to those questions when we have a decision to make, through prayer and counsel and our own hearts.
It's both encouraging and deflating to realize that we've both "been fine" while living in different time zones, but for now I'm just going to focus on the fact that he'll be back by this time next week. Now, for the Welcome Home party planning....
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