If and When

There’s not a way to kiss when you’re afraid it might be the last time.

There’s no way to tie it all up pretty – all the passion and pain, hurt and happiness – in one goodbye embrace. Except to just look at each other and know that underneath and shooting up through it all, you love each other.

You love each other and that is that. It’s why you walk hand in hand through everything life throws.

There are no words for that, just the eyes.

Eyes that watched his own drown tears, an arm wrapped round each child, and finally his brown camouflage body disappearing into a bus so white and nondescript you could never imagine it could cut a family right in two.

Nine months, the middle east, and no guarantees.

These military farewells feel inconceivable, but aren’t they actually the real life we are always living? There are never guarantees, we just forget amidst the grocery stores, carpool schedules, and carefully laid plans.

Even us, who have had a child ripped from our arms – we fear and we also forget.

Every year on Joshua’s birthday we let loose balloons, one for each year he has been gone.

Every year as those balloons drift through the clouds irretrievable, I want to claw my way into the sky and pull them back to me. They are a reminder that for now my child is beyond my reach, and that doesn’t feel okay.

A week ago as my husband rode away for an overseas deployment I wanted to run down the street screaming. I wanted to bang on the bus window and tell them all we had made a mistake. This was not our life.

I wanted to reach him and pull his body back to mine. That white bus felt like white balloons drifting purposeful to where I could not be.

But me who is normally anything but contained, stood quietly as the bus driver carried men and women, fathers, mothers, brothers, daughters down the street and out of sight. A balloon growing to a speck and then there is just blue.

A police officer’s wife messaged me later that day, saying that she knows the ache of waiting, wondering, IF and WHEN her husband will return home. Because our men go into the dark and dangerous places, and they try their best to keep us all safe, to give home to a few more and a few more.

And now I’m driving to sports practices, doing all the parenting, living our normal and feeling anything but. Praying for my heart to receive strength when I cannot.

Honestly, I don’t want if and when to be my life, but we’re all living in this IF and WHEN aren’t we?

Maybe anything that reminds us of that is blessing.

Us standing here – one foot in time, one in eternity – grasping for balloons and busses and trying to figure out how to give one more really good kiss that says everything we cannot.

*p.s. Thank God for the people who get up at 5am to feed your kids donuts while they say goodbye to their Dad