We all hate it when the deployment dates are looming near on a calendar, but it is a fact that military life cannot change. There will be times when duty comes first and the family back home faces a long deployment.
With technology today, they can jump on a computer and send a quick email back home, copy it to wife, mom, aunt and grandma and BOOM the entire family knows that I am OK and I need more Gatorade packets.
Somehow the art of honest letter writing has been lost. To me, even for quick trips or training schools, I have not hesitated to send letters and cards. The most important thing for me is for my sailor to have a visual reminder of how much I love him and how much I am thinking about him.
I write the occasional letter, but mostly I just send the cards from the dollar store. Yes, I admit, I send him cheap cards. There are several reasons, one being you don't really know if he will get it ever or not. Why spend money on expensive cards when the odds are he wont get it any time soon. The second reason is the cheaper they are, the more I can send!
When he was up in Great Lakes for C School, I got him to send me the address there where I could send him mail. He got a letter and a card I sent to him but there were 3 cards that he never got. I just chalked it up to the lovely mail service. After C School, he went on a deployment. When he returned home after the deployment, about a month later, he gets my cards. The training center in Great Lakes had refused the mail. So they forwarded them to a ship he was on more than 4 yrs ago. The Haleyburton gets them and is like what the heck? By some miracle, someone, somewhere was able to look up his name and then forward the mail to his current ship. It took at least 6 months for him to get those cards! But he got them.
Even though we had that whole issue on the Great Lake Adventure, I continue to send him stuff when he is gone for a long time.
I will hand make him cards every once in awhile, but usually I just get an 8 pack of blank note cards from the good old dollar store and send those.
They are small and I can carry them with me whenever. I pre-address and pre-stamp them and keep at least one in my purse all of the time. If I am out somewhere and something happens and I want to tell him about it, I just write it down in the notecard and drop it in the mail.
Sure, by the time he gets the card, I have already told him either over the phone or via email. But I just like feeling like I am telling him right then.
It makes me feel better. I need more things in my life to make me feel better as far as that is concerned. I am always worried about his personal safety, even though he tells me not to worry. I am always worried about him getting enough to eat and getting enough sleep. I love him, what can I say?
I worry about him when he is home and I worry about him when he is deployed. He has a very scary job and I am just always afraid something will happen.
Believe it or not, He saves EVERYTHING I send him! He has a drawer in the bedroom with all of my cards and letters I have ever sent him. Occasionally I will open it and glance through. Its funny to see what I wrote 4 years ago when we had first just started dating. I need to dig up my stuff and compare it. You would see that in the beginning he was head over heels for me and I was trying to take it slow. 4 years later, everything has changed but I wouldn't change it for the world.
Our love grows stronger all the time.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the letters?
