By Lorren Lemmons
@lorrenlemmons

My husband has something to say. He’s fiddling with a loose thread on the couch cushion, tossing his phone from hand to hand. “We need to talk” might as well be tattooed on his forehead.

“Well, I’m going to bed so I can get up early tomorrow,” I say, untangling my legs as I hoist myself off the couch.

“Wait,” my husband stops me, putting his phone down to touch my arm. “Can we talk about compassionate reassignment?”

Compassionate reassignment. The subject I’ve been avoiding for weeks, the one I put a moratorium on until the end of the month. 

In the military, you’re stuck where your command assigns you unless life throws an extenuating circumstance your way. Weeks after our family moved to Georgia, we received a phone call from California. My father-in-law was in the hospital after a heart attack, awaiting open-heart surgery. Less than a month after that, we learned he also had cancer and needed radiation. My husband took two weeks of emergency leave to be with his dad, but when he returned home, the thousands of miles between East and West coasts sat on his shoulders like dead weight. There was a base in California, and we could request to be moved there, citing a family emergency. 

The only problem was, I didn’t want to go. 

Our move to Georgia hurt, but we were healing. As my children grew, their ties to a place were thicker, harder to uproot and replant. They mourned their friends and their routines back in North Carolina. I ached for the community of friends I’d worked so hard to build, missed our quaint little house where I’d brought my daughter home as a newborn. But we’d begun to test the soil to see if we could thrive here, and we were falling in love with our new home. We hadn’t put up picture frames, but we were beginning to carve out routines, to recognize faces at church and the grocery store, to love the Spanish moss on the river and the fireflies in our backyard.

And the base nearest my father-in-law was in the middle of the desert, a forty-five minute drive to the crime-ridden nearest town. I couldn’t imagine starting over so soon after moving, especially leaving our bright, welcoming suburb for a place that seemed so bleak.

So when my husband first suggested compassionate reassignment, the buzzing in my head grew louder and louder, my neck and shoulders growing tight and tense. For what felt like the first time in my life, I had no words. 

Finally, I broke under the weight of the silence. “I can’t talk about this for at least two weeks,” I said. “We’ve made some huge life decisions lately, and I need some time to process. We’ve only been here for six months.” 

Now he won’t be held at arm’s length any longer.

“You’ve been nagging me about going to bed earlier all week, and now you want to have a two-hour conversation?” I say. 

“It doesn’t have to be a two-hour conversation. You said you didn’t want to talk about it until the end of the month, and now it’s the end of the month.” 

“Okay.” I sit back down, feeling as though my body is weighted with stones. I look down at my phone as he offers me the thoughts of his heart. He’s worried about his dad, his only living parent.

“I just want to be there with him,” he says. “You don’t know what it’s like to lose someone. I just--” His voice breaks. “I just want to be close to my family.”

I should be softening, but instead I bristle. “I’m not against this because I don’t care about your dad,” I say. “I’m just thinking of our kids. You are with your family--we’re your family. How is it fair to rip them up again before they’ve even recovered from the last move?” 

We chase the same subjects around for another forty-five minutes or so, getting nowhere. “I guess we can pray about this and talk more later,” my husband says. He gets up first, and I wait until the sink turns off and the light goes out before I go to wash my face and brush my teeth. 

But he’s still standing by the bed, fists balled up and muscles tense. “I can’t believe you refused to talk to me about moving for this long. I can’t believe you wouldn’t even listen to what I had to say.” It bursts out of him, his mouth set in a hard line. He pounds his pillow with his hand. “You wouldn’t even talk to me!” 

I’m crying before I speak, hating that my tears will make me look irrational and manipulative. I hate that I hurt him and I hate that he’s angry with me. 

“I needed to set a boundary,” I sob. “I couldn’t make that decision when you wanted to. I needed time to think.” I wipe my hands across my eyes. “I know you want me to feel the same way that you do, but I don’t. And I’m not sure if I’m going to.” 

He shakes his head and drops into bed, rolling away from me. I lie awake, wondering. Now that the other shoe has dropped, was it worth it to have those two weeks of peace, tiptoeing around the hard subjects? Is a boundary a betrayal? 

Just shy of a year after we first met, my husband and I got engaged and married within ten weeks. We were 22, and I felt pretty confident that I had love figured out. My parents, who had been married for almost 25 years, told us, “The most important thing is that you’re completely crazy about each other. That way you can work through everything.” We’ve got that covered, I thought, nuzzling into my then-fiance’s side on my roommate’s ancient couch, looking up addresses for wedding invitations. 

I took a relationships class in college and attended what we jokingly called “marriage prep” Sunday school at church. I knew to keep communications high, expectations low, and that Disney movies and romcoms were not real life. I read 1st Corinthians 13 and listed out the traits of true love in the margins of my Bible. Suffereth long. Envieth not. Seeketh not her own. Thinketh no evil. Beareth all things. Endureth all things. In the glow of new love, living those principles seemed easy and automatic. Why would I seek my good over his? What wouldn’t I endure for him? 

The thing is, I’m really good at taking tests and memorizing concepts. I’m not so great at practical application. 

Nearly ten years of marriage have rearranged my ideals from their pristine row on the shelf of my mind to a chaotic pile of papers held together by duct tape and longevity. I laugh at the green little girl with her Bible verses and bright diamond ring, professing she knew it wouldn’t be easy while believing the opposite. She had no idea. 

She didn’t know that it would hurt when her husband can’t read her mind, that she would wonder if it meant he didn’t love her enough. She had no idea that after giving and giving, she would want to seek her own desires.  

I can’t help wondering if I’d made a mistake by refusing to talk to my husband. I wasn’t hoping for all things or bearing all things. Instead, I was seeking my own, drawing a firm line to protect myself. Innately I know I have to put on my own proverbial oxygen mask before I can serve others--a hypoxic soul gives only anemic service. But I second-guess the lines I draw--how much is self-preservation, and how much is just self-serving? 

Some of our tension dissipates overnight, and we give each other wary smiles as we get ready in the morning. My ban on the moving conversation has been lifted, and the next time, my husband brings it up more gently. He touches the bruise but doesn’t poke too hard, and over the days and weeks it heals. I stay open and listen to his reasoning, even though the thought of uprooting our family spikes my heart rate. He backs off when he hears my breath hitch and sees my eyes threatening tears. I ask friends who have been stationed at the base about their experiences and tentatively make contingency plans. We’re not giving in to each other, exactly, but now that we’ve both staked our territory in this argument, we see where the other stands. Instead of driving a wedge, the boundaries are giving us freedom to cross, safe lanes to travel precarious ground. 

When he comes to me a few months later and tells me he thinks we should stay in Georgia until the end of his military service instead of relocating to California, I see the wistfulness in his face, the plans that won’t be coming to fruition. I feel immense relief, but also some wistfulness of my own--sorrow that he is hurting, and the desire to comfort him. 

It’s still a dance, and we stumble over the more complicated steps. I’m not completely sure how to erect boundaries without causing harm to the person I love, or how to love freely without causing harm to myself. I try to love a little better, to give all I can without erasing myself, to lend support without breaking my back. 

We’ve started hiking on Sunday afternoons, and one of our favorite places is Savannah Rapids Park. Even in the middle of winter, it’s green by the river. The boys throw clumps of red Georgia clay into the water and glimpse turtles sunning on rocks. 

At the end of the path, we reach a dam. The sign says “Savannah Locks,” and I know it’s part of the dam mechanism, but just beyond is a fence with hundreds of actual locks, a dixie mimic of the Pont des Arts “love locks” bridge in Paris. Some locks are heavy and antique looking, others engraved with names and wedding dates. Our kids pull out their offerings--padlocks from the bottom of the tool box, dated with a Sharpie.

My eyes meet my husband’s as we help little fingers find an empty spot on the crowded fence. We don’t have our own love lock today, but it feels like a declaration of love all the same, locking a little bit of ourselves to the choice we made together to stay.

Guest essay written by Lorren Lemmons. Lorren is a mother of three, a military spouse, a pediatric nurse, and a lover of words. She lives in Georgia with her family. Her work has previously been featured on Coffee + Crumbs and other websites, including Military Moms Blog, where she is a regular contributor. You can connect with Lorren on her website or Instagram.

Photo by Lottie Caiella.