R&R leave...

There are odd things that happen when you get deployed. Many expectations or realities that are never fully understood or fully grasped. One of those odd things is when you get R&R leave.


The reasons are several that R&R is an odd experience when you are deployed. The first is, the expectation of coming home....seeing family, friends and just being surrounded by civilians. When you out process, you get a briefing on the basics...the old, "don't drink too much, eat too much, drugs are bad, don't beat your wife/husband/kids/dogs/neighbors/etc, and don't be mean." When you get the brief, no one wants to be there and everyone is too busy worrying about what they are going to have to do right afterwards. Rarely is everyone thinking about the weird oddities they are going to find when they get home...or when they get back here.

For the involved individual, you are the central person for something important...whether you are the person that came up with the way to track the battle that works the best, run a program or are just involved in the everyday decision making of whatever echelon you are assigned to. When you are here, you are important, people come to you for decisions, people come to you for help...people just come to you. When you leave here...people don't come to you anymore for whatever it was they were coming to you for...they have to find someone else, someone who knows (because you did a good hand off with that person on everything they need to know to cover down for you) or is supposed to know what is going on and how to answer the questions...or they just figure it out themselves.

The same can be said for our families back home. Before I left, I was involved with my son's life in every way I could be...meal making, bath times, bed time stories, playing in the backyard - the list goes on. I was also involved in my wife's life - being a sounding board for her frustrations with work, Asher, people in general - watching Asher for an hour so she can go grocery shopping and be able to actually get what we needed instead of trying to keep Asher wrangled up long enough to find the necessary items...or very simply to just be able to give her a hug at the end of a long, tiring day and share a nice glass of wine.

So, obviously, when I left home, I tried to make sure that most of the big ticket items were taken care of. Upon returning on R&R leave, I come home to a different house...still looks the same, smells the same and is the same address...however the house is just.......different. And so are the two people and dog that live there. I was a bit worried about how my son would react to me coming home after being gone for almost 10 months (I really left home 10 May 2010) and not being active in his life...not being physically present with him. It was a bit rough the first couple of days - he didn't want Daddy to give him a bath, he didn't want Daddy to read bedtime stories, he didn't want Daddy to make his breakfast or get his movies started...those had been and were Mommy's job and he made that very clear. A few days before I left to come back, however, the tables had turned and I was back into the normal routine...just in time to mess it all up again.

Now, lets not forget about Em in this whole thing. She didn't have anyone to hand off any of the responsibilities to for the same amount of time. She HAD to be Mommy on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days week...she had no other choice. She was gracious enough to let me be able to slide into some of the responsibilities without any fuse whatsoever...I think she was just glad for a break from some of it for even just a few minutes! :) But, then I left again and now sometimes, it seems like I was never really home...because two weeks is a very, very short time. I had expected to be able to jump back into the same roles and responsibilities again and I too high of expectations...I needed to take it a little slower.

When I was getting ready to return here, I, once again, made the mistake of thinking that I would be coming back to the same thing I had left... When I returned, the same people were here, but the people were not the same. Things had happened while I had been gone, missions had been run and we, as a Task Force, had been successful in some areas and failed in others. I expected people to once again reach out to me for the information they had before, I expected people to reach out to me as a source for things they had needed before I left and that didn't happen...not right away and still is a bit different than before I left.

The biggest hurdle to all of this...is getting over the ego of oneself and the thinking that everything will only change because YOU change it. People change, perceptions change, experiences are had, views change and people's reliance on others changes...and you just have to deal with it. You have to deal with it, because at the end of the day a saying that my mother and father taught me at a very young age is true. "The worst news in life is, you're not that important. The best news in life is, you're not that important." This saying has guided me through many times in my life. The only thing I would add is that the best news in life, is that you are important to someone...even if you don't know who that someone is just yet.

~Jake