Later, during a period in which Sam didn’t see Ross for almost three weeks, two of those because Ross was on a basic fighter maneuvers detachment and one because after that he came home every evening long past Sam’s bedtime and left again in the dark predawn hours before he woke up, Sam yelled at me suddenly from his car seat, “Want to moosh Daddy’s flight suit! Want to moosh Daddy’s pickup truck!” “Moosh” was the most violent word he knew at the time, aside from “bonk,” and the flight suit and pickup truck were the two most tangible symbols of Ross and his absence. I didn’t know how to respond to this one. I still vividly remembered how powerfully I loathed seeing my dad’s olive green duffel bag laid out on the bed, ready to be packed, and how equally elated I was when I spotted it coming around the luggage carousel when we picked him up again at the airport. I think I ended up agreeing that the flight suit and pickup could probably do with a good mooshing.
Gratitude—for my healthy children, for every one of Ross’s uneventful flights, for a relatively smooth patch of mental health despite the exhaustion—goes a long way, but almost immediately after Wes’s birth, pressures at work picked up for Ross again and I found myself solo parenting a newborn and a twenty-one-month-old around the clock. Then we all started getting sick. A stunning variety of “bugs” ping-ponged back and forth between Ross and me and the boys, and all the fevers, the vomit, the sleepless nights, the random trips to the ER, just multiplied our workload. There was no relief. At work, Ross’s colleagues started calling him “Patient Zero” and telling jokes about his two remaining white blood cells.
Around this time, Mikayla started traveling extensively for a nonprofit organization she had started. The best friend I had envisioned raising babies with was out of town most of the time, and it took me a while to realize that even when she was at home, she was less and less interested in hanging out with me. She was much more committed to her friendship with another one of the wives and, rather than taking this in stride, I fretted over what I’d done to offend her, tried and failed to win her back, and then spent great amounts of energy mourning our lost connection. If I hadn’t been so busy moping about being what I called “friend dumped” and staring sadly at my back fence, I might have seen my brief, intense bond with Mikayla for what it was—an obvious attempt to find a bandage for the bleeding loss of Stella.
Distanced once again by our schedules, Ross and I fostered a perplexing silent competition over which of us was the most overworked and amassed small armies of resentments, strategically deploying them in the few precious hours we had together. When we first moved to Fallon, I had seen TOPGUN as a rescue, a lucky twist of fate that kept Ross from going to Afghanistan for most of Sam’s infancy, but now it seemed like the monumental stress and the brutal schedule of this three-year shore tour were creating a distance between us that may as well have been oceans. I was sick of feeling like my only option, always, was to acquiesce, to flex, to wait, to compromise—above everything else, I was learning, being a TOPGUN wife required patience, and I was nearing the end of mine.
We fought volcanically about an expensive camera I’d bought with award money from graduate school, and how I could never seem to remember to put it back in its case, and then about a mark I noticed on Sam’s shoulder, the origins of which neither of us knew exactly, but that I feared could easily have appeared during one of Ross’s intense, nearly nose-to-nose disciplining moments. It would have been easy to squeeze too hard—I knew this from nearly having done it myself—but I also knew I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t bring it up. The resulting fight was one that left us both tearstained and utterly spent, him deeply wounded from an accusation he found unthinkable, and me openly unsure of whether I trusted him not to hurt our children. I felt bound—by babies, debt, illness, isolation, the daunting cost and logistics of travel, and law—to a man I hardly ever saw and then fought with when I did. The Singapore divorce talk was a joke compared to this, a tiny squall we sailed through relatively easily and counted ourselves seasoned.
Thus did we end up in marriage counseling a second time, but with a much better therapist, who let on that she saw many military couples and that our situation was neither unique nor unsalvageable. Ross also had the explicit support of his then skipper, a divorced father who encouraged Ross to do whatever it took to keep his family together. This made a huge difference in the attitudes both of us brought into counseling—his that marriage counseling was a legitimate use of an evening hour in which he could have been staying on at work, and mine that the Navy did actually give a shit if the job was eating people alive. Removing the scheduling and prioritization roadblocks allowed us to put Ross’s job back into context, that is, as only one thing among many weighing on us and making demands on our collective resources.