You Can Never Really Go Home Again

I had an epithany today. I can’t leave Texas. I know that sounds weird given how unhappy I have been since moving here but I realized that although it isn’t much of one, my life is here now. I came to this conclusion while I was writing an email to my friend, Kevin. Kevin was asking me if I was still involved in theatre which is something I did in college when he still knew me and something I did at home as well. I began to think about all the things my parents and my friends at home tell me about that I would be doing if I was still there. I suddenly realized that their lives had gone on without me just as mine had gone on without them. Shawn and I were just talking last night about me spending the last few months of the deployment in Mobile after he returns back to Iraq from R & R. I told him that as much as I love my parents, I didn’t want to live with them for two to three months while I wait for him to come home. As a married woman who hasn’t lived with her parents for 5 years now, I can’t imagine living with them again. Don’t get me wrong, it is great to have Mommy and Daddy take care of me again. But some days I don’t want to babied. When you are going through a deployment like this, there are times when you really just need to be alone with your thoughts in order to fully deal with the situation around you. I have been through this before and I know myself well enough to know when I need to be alone. Mom doesn’t always get that. Besides, I don’t really want to leave my house for that long. I have enough anxiety over Shawn coming home safely. I don’t need to be worried about my house 700 miles away as well. I remember my Freshman Comp Professor at Judson (who didn’t love Dr. Dan?) telling us early in the semester that you could never really go home again. Being a college student, I thought that was true but I don’t think I fully understood the meaning of that statement until now. Mobile is no longer my home. My home truly is where the Army sends us.