At some point in early May, Ross was able to drop back in long enough to see our bean-shaped boy on an ultrasound and get all teary-eyed with me, and then in one particularly mystifying week, my parents flew out to California to see Fresno State declare me one of its top graduate students and then lay me off from my job working for the program that awarded me my degree. So much for worrying about maternity leave! During this same week, I became convinced that my father was going to have a heart attack because he spent most of his visit holed up in Ross’s study checking and rechecking his e-mail, refusing to eat, and occasionally hollering out profanities at people whose names I didn’t recognize along with updates on the worsening crisis on the Gulf Coast. I was furious at him and sad for him at the same time, and when President Obama finally called a moratorium on all offshore drilling and Dad’s project in the Arctic got put on hold, my mom and I returned to the house one day to find him throwing a tennis ball for my dog and looking like he’d won something. Which I guess he had: time. But the next day it was time for everybody to leave again because it was—
June, and time for nine weeks on a boat off the coast of Hawaii in a joint training exercise called RIMPAC, but which everybody called RIMJOB because it was an unplanned absence that got penciled in. During this time I cleaned out my desk at work and found that my world shrank drastically as my belly expanded. At home, swelling and swatting flies in the oppressive Central Valley heat, I plunged myself headlong into a research spiral on unmedicated birth, breastfeeding, sleep training, and social science theories on infant development. I became an ardent fan of “studies” that “suggested,” and took worrying to dizzying new heights.
Ross came back from RIMPAC in the first week of August to gasp at my size and lay his ear against the tumult in my belly and attend a quick baby shower at Stella’s house before packing up again two weeks later for Air Wing Fallon, a month-long pretend war waged over the Nevada desert. We started talking about baby names via text message.
He came back in mid-September, and would have had to leave again before our son was born had someone not managed to break an aircraft carrier in San Diego, causing the detachment for COMPTUEX/JTFEX (composite training unit exercise/joint task force exercise) to “slide to the right.” But slide it did, and I was just able to toss out some basic instructions to Ross about how he was to step in now and be my birth coach (the books I had been reading suggested that we should have prepared for this months in advance with joint breathing exercises and extensive visualization, but oh, well). We muddled our way through with last-minute emergency repairs to the Honda, more dog X-rays, and a base-wide power outage all converging on our son’s birth day, and then two weeks later, with my mom arriving just in time as backup, Ross left again for another month and didn’t return until late November, when we were finally able to enjoy the bulk of our time together that year.
Keep in mind that this was all leading up to a combat deployment in January, one that was slated to last anywhere from seven to nine months. Ross was scheduled to have “rolled out” of the squadron only a few months into the deployment, meaning he’d have finished his time with them and moved on to his next job, which is called a “shore tour,” but since they were going to Afghanistan and he was by then a senior pilot, the plan was to extend his tour and keep him through the whole deployment. This would have meant missing most of our son’s first year. Many people in the military have a story like this. Many have much worse ones.
However, a couple of months earlier, Ross had applied to TOPGUN, hoping to be accepted to the famed tactics course at Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada and then, once he completed it, to serve out his shore tour for the next three years as a TOPGUN instructor. If he was accepted, the skipper would allow him to roll out on time. As long shots go, it was such a big one that neither of us allowed ourselves to think of it as a genuine possibility, so when it actually did come through, the sensation I remember most was not one of elation or celebration but rather stunned, almost disbelieving relief.
And that was 2010.
—
Trying to plot our movements for those twelve months, I imagine Ross existing in a cold, dry airborne world, where the oxygen is thin and all voices are tinny and sharp and carry information in precise, carefully timed bursts. I imagine the weeks flying by but also dragging somehow, like the disparity between what your airspeed feels like compared to your relative ground speed. I imagine the scratchiness of the sheets in the variety of temporary beds he slept in and I wonder if he ever had any of those night wakings where you have to wonder for long moments where you are or what day it is.