He made it! It was so good
to hear his voice on the phone and
know he was on American soil. I
was so happy, tears streamed down
my face. He was in North Carolina
at Camp Lejune, and he would be
allowed to return home to Ohio in
about a week. He wanted me to
come see him in North Carolina, so
I arranged a babysitter and drove
the 14 hours to see him. I threw the
car in park and didn’t even close
the door. I saw him standing on the
second floor balcony of a hotel and
ran to him. I imagined this moment
every day and night of the deployment. I imagined he would embrace
me and pick me up and twirl me
around and kiss me and we would
both cry tears of joy. That didn’t
happen. I ran into him so hard it
made him take a step back. He put
his arms around me and buried his
face in my neck and just took several deep breaths. I pulled back and
looked at his face and his eyes were
different, darker, almost haunted.
He said, “Hey, good to see you.”
In that moment, our new reality began. Our new reality was life with
PTSD. We didn’t know it yet, we
just knew things were different.
Over the next few years, I
became used to the excessive night
sweats, night terrors, increased startle reflex, bursts of anger, bouts of
deep sadness, depression even crept
in a few times for both of us. I, as
many civilians and others who
don’t understand PTSD, came to
think this is what PTSD is. I have
come to understand it is the very tip
of a gigantic iceberg. It has taken
me years to get where I am. And I
have not done so without making
many mistakes. I have judged my
husband and hurt him deeply by
doing so. I have made him feel that
I expect an end to PTSD, that
somewhere out there, there is a
cure, and if I do enough research,
and cart him to enough counseling
sessions, he will have an epiphany
and be healed. I could feel he was
holding me at arms’ length and I
started to think something was
wrong with me. I didn’t realize that
I was the one who needed the
epiphany. It took almost losing our
marriage and knowing if our marriage ended, he would most likely
end his life, to get me really digging deep and finally coming to
comprehend what my husband lives
with every day. Every minute of
every day of every year of his life,
he deals with the torture that is
PTSD.
Sure, there is the “hypervigilance”
(which
he
calls
“situational awareness”), the startle
reflex, night sweats, night terrors,
sadness and depression which is
always grasping at him and wanting
to take more and more of him
away. Physical pain accompanying
depression makes things he used to
enjoy impossible, which in turn,
worsens his depression. There are
friends lost because they don’t understand him anymore. There are
people offended by outbursts of
anger. There are those horrified by
stories he finds amusing. There are
issues with his memory. Issues he
comes across while driving. Issues
with being confined. Issues with
being in large crowds. Issues with
being in small crowds. I could go
on and on, but these are all surface
issues. These are things people can
notice about him which are different than he was before the deployment.
he keeping a wall between us? I
kept thinking I wanted him to
change back to the person he was
before the deployment. What I really craved was the connection before
the deployment, which we had never regained.
At the end of last year, we
ended up in a bad situation. He was
in a depression so deep he felt he
didn’t deserve my love or anyone
else’s. He felt he could never live
up to my expectation of someday
being “back to normal.” He felt I
deserved better. He said and did
things trying to push me away and
trying to end our marriage. I misunderstood so many aspects of our
new normalcy and I judged him. I
attached a stigma to him he couldn’t accept and he felt he had served
his country to come home and lose
it all. I was tired of being the buffer
between PTSD and our kids, our
family and friends. I was tired of
making excuses and apologies for
things I didn’t even understand.
I was on the verge of walking away. He had hurt me, and I felt
I didn’t deserve it. For a few days, I
tried to formulate a plan for what
my life would be without him. I
then realized I couldn’t even imagine my life without him. My love
for him was greater than the hurt
and anger I was feeling. Stubbornness kicked in, I put my foot down
and told him I refused to accept
this. I refused to let my marriage
end. I refused to lose him. No matter how hard it was to repair, our
marriage was worth it. Our love
story deserved for us to fight
through this. I looked him in his
eyes and told him I knew his actions were not reflective of the man
I knew. I didn’t know why he was
acting this way, but I was going to
figure it out, and most importantly,
I was going to love him through it.
I wasn’t leaving.
As his wife, I noticed more.
And come to realize the “more” is
the real problem. I noticed his selfconfidence is not what it used to be.
There is a level of self-loathing that
breaks my heart. I am his wife. I
love him. I am so proud he is a part
of American history. I am proud of
what he has done. I wish with everything I am, he could see himself
as I see him. I know he is a genuinely good man. I know he has a
good heart. For the longest time, I
just didn’t understand why he was
You can say what you want
being so hard on himself. Why was about God and faith and prayer and
The Wa