Does this deployment make me look fat?
When my son (Mike) was headed for Iraq my husband (Bryan) was headed to Ft. Benning. I was headed toward a nervous breakdown on some days because of all of the uprooting taking place. I had been running a small consulting business from my home for a couple of years prior to the Military infiltration that happened in our very own living room that year. I called my clients one by one and let them know that my time as a private consultant had come to an end. I knew it would be insane to even try to keep that up. Not to mention that I was already planning a PCS for later that year.
My work was gone. I was a solo-mom for a while. I had a demanding and high energy toddler, and a teenager (c’mon how useful is a teenager?) to figure things out for (as well as a college student). I knew that stress was going to be more familiar to me than sleep, and I needed to figure out what I was going to do to keep my sanity. Proactive planning was the game plan, but how in the world do you plan for something you know absolutely nothing about? I had never dealt with a deployment up close and personal. Wives are neurotic (I know because I am one), but mothers take neurotic expression to a whole new level when deployment is involved.
My strategy became something that I have benefited from since the moment I made the decision and implemented it. Prior to the Army insanity in our home I had faced a couple of illnesses and was having a hard time recovering from having Emma later in life. I wasn’t on my death bed or anything, but I had slowly put on extra weight and slowly gotten way out of shape (for me anyway). This whole matter had been driving me crazy anyway. I have always been a pretty high energy and health person. Now, I was getting winded taking a flight of stairs. It was not my body, and so I decided to find myself again!
The day after I dropped Bryan off at the recruiters station for his luxury trip to Uncle Benning’s Camp for Wayward Husbands, I stopped by the gym and signed up. I decided that I would go every day of the week except Sunday — to the best of my ability. They had a child care center and it was part of the membership. So, everyday during that summer (and beyond) I would go and hop on the cross trainer (who I affectionately named “The Beast!”).
I started out doing 10-minutes at a time, but within a couple of months I was doing 60-minutes daily at a 10-minute mile pace on an incline. How did I do it? Easy. Stress (and sometimes rage) was my fuel. I was also motivated by the clear understanding (from previous work) that health does not simply mean the absence of disease. I was not healthy and I could be. Once I admitted it and owned it, I had no excuse to not fix it!
When I got on “The Beast” (or later the treadmill or street to run) I would turn on my iPod, put on some music that stirred up my feelings of wanting to pound someone or something to a pulp — not sad or happy music. I often listened to metal rage screamed out with the deepest inner-turmoil expressed by disenfranchised white guys. I asked my sons to give me suggestions — they kept it confined to music that was intense, but clean enough for a mom to not choke to death listening to (think selective Breaking Benjamin, Pantera, etc). When I was on “The Beast” I would think about the insult I heard earlier that week hurled at our Troops in Iraq (aka, my sons!). I would remember the conversation about the close call in Baghdad, or about the day shrapnel hit my son in Baqubah. It’s very easy to burn 875 calories in one hour when you are working out fear and anger on that level.
By the time Bryan had finished BCT and was moving on to OCS I had already dropped 25+ pounds and was still losing and toning up. When I went to see him at graduation he wasn’t sure if I really looked that good, or if the prior months of Army smell and sleep deprivation were playing tricks on his mind. When I had noticed the look of shock on his face I whispered in his ear (lovingly of course) “you lucky cad!” That way he would know it was really me and not just a figment of his imagination.
The intense cardio workouts led me to start kick boxing, body sculpting and eventually led me to kettlebell workouts. It’s addictive for me. I picked up swimming a few months ago while I was nursing a stress fracture in my foot. I like it well enough, but I am ready to run. My motivation now is different. Bryan is home and recovered from his fast, furious and insane tango with Uncle Sam. He’s having an on-again, off-again, quasi-clandestine love/hate affair with the Army. That’s a blog entry that will be written in January (or so I suspect). Mike is settled in and tucked away with a new wife. He’s not scheduled for deployment for quite some time. Nate, my youngest son is Army ROTC bound and that starts in the Fall. It’s all pretty tame — FOR NOW.
My Blue Star flag is still flying right next to my American flag. I know that as long as there is a threat to the one, there will be a threat to the other. They both stand for something I love dearly, and something I could never bear to lose. As a family we all need to be ready “in season and out of season.”
