We planned a trip to hike through the Redwoods and snowshoe around Crater Lake, and while we camped in the rain and stayed in a series of tiny cabins packed deep in the snow, I checked my temperature and drew little asterisks on the calendar, adding the ebb and flow of my ovulations to many other colored lines I was keeping track of. We collected visitor center stamps in a small blue National Parks Passport and talked about where we wanted to take our kids camping when they were old enough. I dreamed of names, and nicknames for those names. Ross planned monthly contributions to college accounts. Neither of us mentioned Afghanistan.
I wanted it to be there, on that postdeployment winter vacation at Crater Lake, among the snowy trees and cobalt blue of a water-filled volcano, that we conceived a new life, miles from the Navy and with Ross’s “freedom beard” in full bloom, but the universe evidently has a sense of humor and persistent way of making its point about how much control you have just because you can read a calendar. For all my careful color-coding of our schedules—my school, work, and ovulations laid over his work and frequent absences—and the pitiably few number of times it all matched up, our son went from being an idea to a reality on a weekend when it was never supposed to happen. It was two months after our vacation, and I had tagged along with Stella and her kids for another six-hour drive down the California coast to San Diego, where the squadron was on a training detachment. According to what I thought was a pretty solid pattern in my ovulation and inconclusive evidence from the thermometer, I had already ovulated and missed the window. Ross and I had less than thirty-six hours together. Stella, who had logged more hours listening to me work through my longing to be a mother than anyone else, grinned at me on the drive home and asked, “So—feeling pregnant?”
“Ha. Unlikely.”
But for the first time in five months, the egg had been late. The first law of calendars, that they chart and track time in predictable ways, was broken. That was January 2010. The baby was due in October. The squadron was scheduled to leave in early January 2011. With no idea how it would all turn out, we checked our ropes and leaned back into the blackness.
CHAPTER 14
The second law of calendars is that their smaller measured units—days, weeks, months—all add up to the same amount of time for each year, give or take a day or so, adding up to a complete orbit around the sun. We broke this law in 2010, a year that came and went somehow in a far shorter interval than the 365 days it promised. During this truncated time, our first son was born and we made it from one end of the year to the other—without a deployment—seeing each other in short bursts for a combined total of seven weeks. I am tempted to include a chart, but even that would miss some essential truth about what it was like, how it all happened. Ross and I actually had to sit down with our day planners and plow through old e-mails to try to piece it together. Some of the absences were planned, some were surprises, some were the result of error, and some were billed as “opportunities.” Nearly all involved acronyms.
Take a deep breath. Here we go: January was for “TAC D&E bullshit” at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego, where nearly everything broke and a jet got struck by lightning (no one was hurt, but the electrical system got fried). One weekend, I showed up for thirty-six hours and Ross got me pregnant.
In February, he went to the East Coast for LSO School to get certified as a landing signals officer. This was the “opportunity” for a new credential. Hurray!
In March, the squadron went to Fallon, Nevada, for SFARP, which marked the start of work-ups for the next scheduled deployment to Afghanistan the following January. Whatever the hell SFARP means has been explained to me multiple times and I still can’t remember. Somewhere in here I stopped throwing up into a Big Gulp cup in my car on the way to work and grad school in the mornings because my first trimester was over.
April meant three weeks on an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego with no phone contact for TSTA, another mystery acronym, and it was during TSTA that the Deepwater Horizon caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Mexico and I became addicted to Googling satellite images of the spreading spill and wallowing in a deep sense of foreboding.