Comparison

“Comparison is the thief of joy.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

This quote resonates with me, as I’m sure it does with many women, because I see the evidence of its truth in my own life. It sums up so simply something I struggle with daily. I compare myself with the women around me to the detriment of my own satisfaction and content. But this thievery does not always come through jealousy and vanity. Recently, it is comparison-inspired guilt that absconds with my joy.  

My husband has been home now for nearly two years. No deployments, no schools, no time down range. He’s worked reasonable hours, eaten dinner at our table most nights, been home every weekend, attended most games – even had time to coach our son’s football team and visit him at school.

A week ago, being able to say this made me giddy and grateful.  After the emotional and mental rigors of so many years spent with him either preparing to leave, leaving, or trying to integrate back into our family, this time has been a gift – a gift we know has a fast-approaching expiration date.

It was something I deeply appreciated … until a close friend’s husband deployed yet again. Mine didn’t. Another friend’s husband commands a basic training unit and is spending their “break assignment” putting in 16-hour days six or seven days a week. Mine isn’t. Another friend struggles to nurse her three very young children through their dad’s year in Afghanistan with little help and little hope. I’m doing just fine.

Suddenly, I feel a little less grateful, a little less giddy. Instead, I feel guilt. A dark whisper casts its shadow in the back of my mind, urging me to regret this intermission in what once felt like a never-ending separation cycle. It distorts my vision of this blissful period as the tiny window in our married life when we’ve actually been able to relax and let our guards down and just be in the moment. Now, it is the wall that keeps me from reaching out to women I care so much about.

I am flooded with a mix of guilt, sympathy, and a sense of powerlessness. We were a club once – united by the shared experience of weathering deployments and other Army-related absences. We didn’t feel sorry for each other, because we were all in it together. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been through it before – I’m not going through it now. Somehow, I’ve escaped. I can’t offer them the camaraderie that I once could, the mutually understood smile that says, “I know what you’re going through. Right now. This very minute. Me, too.”  

I look at these women, at their trials, and I know that my family is lucky. We have been there, too. Many times. We have earned our time; we deserve this respite. But so have they; so do they. So do all the other military families struggling with sporadic separations. So do the families transformed by injuries, seen and unseen. So do the families whose loved ones didn’t come home.

So, how dare I feel bad that my husband is home and safe and present? But how dare I enjoy it either? Comparison is the thief of joy, but sometimes I feel like I stole it first.

Making My List

There is a list many of us keep, a mental tally of pain and loneliness, fear and uncertainty, anger and frustration. Me? I add to mine every time I watch him grow smaller and fade into a crowd of uniforms, disappearing from sight and touch and smell for indeterminate lengths of time. Every time first steps are taken or first teeth are lost or first goals are scored, and he’s not there to share it. Every birthday and anniversary and holiday celebrated with a care package mailed or an intermittent video chat or a static-filled phone call. Every emotional and mental upheaval that fails to ebb when his boots suddenly reappear by the door. It is a catalogue of the chaos, a manifest of the misery.

And as I account for all the time and tears and irreversible changes, I suddenly forget why we signed up for this. In fact, if I am completely honest with myself, I sometimes like to omit that we did sign up for this.

My list is full of valid suffering, and yet it is flawed. It overlooks our carefully made choice of a lifestyle that delivers these itemized hardships; it ignores the benefits and advantages that we hesitate to declare as loudly as we do our grievances; it gives more weight to our pain than to our joy.

I can’t remember ever keeping track of all the time, the precious time, my family has been together. I’ve never made an inventory of the special days and ordinary days and terrible, very bad, no-good days that we’ve spent together. Of dinners eaten across the table from one another, sideline cheers shouted in unison, milestones witnessed and memories made together, pictures taken with him instead of for him.

Why don’t I have two lists? And if I’m only going to have one list, why should it be a list of lament? There was a reason we chose this, even if I can’t remember it so clearly when I most need to. And with the risks come, too, the rewards – even when they seem to pale in comparison.

We signed up for this, again and again, until it was for good. And it is for good – for the good of our family. So, I think, I hope, that I will crumple up my list, ball it up in my fist and throw it as far as I can. And then I will make a new list, a complete list. A list that tracks all of our experiences, that registers the trials and the triumphs. A list that remembers not only the sacrifices, but also the hard-earned gains we’ve made as a result.

And the first item on my list, no matter what follows, will be: He came home.