It seems up to this deployment or even part of it, I have been living a life of “tomorrow I will”. Tomorrow I will start eating better. Tomorrow I will start the laundry, or clean the house, run the dishwasher, clean the car etc. etc. Tomorrow I will step on the scale and I will have lost a pound. Tomorrow I will look in the mirror and embrace the way that I look post babies and will be happy with it. Tomorrow I will make that phone call, or I will stop waiting for that one that never comes. Tomorrow I will hear from that person because tomorrow they will feel bad for the way they treat me. Obviously this list of “tomorrows” can go on and on. I always set goals, always have and probably always will. I make obsessive lists of things I always want to do “tomorrow”, or over many “tomorrows” but I always find a way of running circles around them. But the beauty of these “tomorrow I wills” is this deployment has taught me that some of them aren’t important. This deployment has shown me strength in myself because I must rely on me, and up until now I never realized how much I relied on everyone else around me. I have a power within me now as cheesy and lame as that sounds. I know now what I am truly capable of, the things that should and shouldn’t matter, and what must be today and not tomorrow.
I’ve realized that I could probably spend every day of the rest of my life trying to measure up to the standard I set in my head for myself. But I realize now that I won’t ever be a size two again, but eating fairly well, and exercising as often as I am motivated to and have time for will always be good enough. The dishes and such can wait, but loving on my kids and taking a mental time out cannot. Today I don’t care anymore about being liked, accepted, supported, or appreciated by those people who’ve neglected me and left me alone during what could possibly be the loneliest time for me. Forgoing this constant state of tomorrows has changed me in such an amazing way that as sick and twisted as it sounds makes this deployment a good thing for me. My new philosophy of “today” is why I now am making friends with amazing people in my neighborhood, why the kids and I now have a break from each other every other week, why I go to the gym because it feels good not because anything is or isn’t happening on the scale, and why I of all people have actually let my house be filthy for days at a time. Because sometimes especially without Jesse, I have to get over myself and let things just happen or not happen for that matter. But the beauty in all this is for the first time in a long time…it’s really time for me to focus on so much more than missing Jesse and counting down the months, weeks, days, hours until he’s home.
