Monday 6 February 2012

The Dreaded Phone Call

When I was at work the other day I got a phone call and for a moment my heart stopped beating.  I don't get a lot of signal at work, so I didn't really catch what they said, but the conversation started with:
Them: Hello, is that Miss Bean?
Me: Yes...
Them: This is xxxx from mr's battalion, corps

My heart stopped and I immediately thought the worst.  Although I am his person, if something were to happen to him, it likely his parents would get the smart men in suits to the door to break the bad news.  Though they may send me some too, I would probably get a phone call, which was what I thought this was.  Mr is far away at the moment, out of the country, in another time zone for 4 months.  Although he's had the odd couple of weeks in the EU on exercise it's the first time he's been away on tour, so far away, for such a long time and out of contact.  We do pretty well with our long distance relationship, but this is tough.  My best friend has left the country, I can't just pick up the phone and tell him about my day, or hear about his.  We normally ring each other everyday from bed before we fall asleep to talk to each other and he keeps me grounded and sane and makes me laugh and smile everyday without fail.  I am so lonely without him.  It's about 81 sleeps until he comes home now, but we don't have a definitive home date yet.  Then he's back for a few months and then off out again for a couple more months.

I keep seeing everywhere happy couples, pregnant ladies, slushy film plots, my housemates nipping off for the weekend visiting their other halves and it's Valentine's Day coming up - all just reminders that my mr isn't here and isn't going to be here for a really long time.  It's worse in a way to being single, because at least you don't expect anything then.  But we haven't broken up, we're really happy, it's going well and still he isn't here.  Because of the ridiculous time difference and his insanely long working day hours if I'm lucky there's a five-ten minute window when I can skype him in the evening and it's his lunch break.  If not, I can stay up really late/early in the morning to talk to him when he's finished work, or he has to get up even earlier to talk to me before he starts work.  It's pretty impossible to work with.  Safe to say, I'm not a happy bean at the moment.  I'm not doing bad, but I'm so lonely.  Friends that I talk to keep saying how they don't think they could do it, mostly because it's too long, but some said it was because they couldn't trust them.  Thankfully, we don't have that problem.  I laughed when they said two weeks away was too long.  Ahh, to be one of those normal couples where good bye means I'll see you tonight, not I'll see you in a month or three.

Happily, what it actually turned out to be was an invite to a Ladies Night Dinner his mess are holding for all the wives and girlfriends of the guys who are overseas. And breathe....  I can't make the dinner night because it is a school night for me, so I kindly declined the invitation.  With that, the nice man on the end of the phone told me that if I needed anything at all while mr was away I only had to ask and they were all there to support me, even though I don't live on base.  Or any where near base, for that matter.  That, surprisingly, made it all a little better.  A slight admission from them that they are being real b*****ds splitting people up like this, and that there's a support network there to do whatever they can to help to apologise.

So, although this has been a bit of a mushy post from me, hopefully it's enlightened you a little into the life of an Army Officer WAG.  I certainly never thought about the other halves when I saw bits about the army on the news until I was one.

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