The Home Front
With my husband in Iraq, the kids and I fight our own battles.
by Korinthia Klein
April 2, 2007
We don't have family in town and it's hard to repeatedly ask neighbors and friends for favors, so when I had performance and teaching commitments, I scrambled for sitters. I was up at 5:30 every morning to make breakfast and stayed up past midnight every night to get the house in enough order to tackle another day. By the end of my pregnancy, there were times I literally couldn't walk and our unborn son didn't let me sleep.
To make things worse, for the first time in our relationship, Ian and I grew distant. He'd entered a world I couldn't relate to. He emailed me about inconceivable heat and about learning to sleep through the sound of mortar fire. He was required to wear full body armor just to walk to the bathroom; a rifle was his constant companion. I chose not to burden him with anything that might distract him from his job, but that made life at home even lonelier. I tried not to let the girls see me cry.
Ian's deployment was not typical. We don't live on a base like so many army families, but rather in a working-class neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, not far from where my grandfather was born and raised during the Depression. Ian was plucked out of his reserve unit and assigned to fill a slot in an active-duty unit in Texas. That unit has a support network for relatives, which is known as a "family readiness group," and the Army has a twenty-four-hour hotline, but these things haven't been helpful to me. Every so often, I would get a call from a well-meaning Army outreach person asking how I was holding up. They didn't seem to
Ian was able to arrange leave for our son's birth. It was wonderful having him home. know what to do with my usual answer: "Not well." A pleasant officer in Ohio once asked what he could do. I told him: unless he could lug the laundry up from the basement, not much.
Fortunately, Ian was able to arrange his two weeks of leave to overlap with our son's birth. Quinn was born big and healthy and pink, and I loved seeing Ian so proud and happy. I left the hospital after only two nights — much too soon considering I'd had a C-section, but I hated sitting alone in my room watching reruns of Law & Order when I knew I was missing time with Ian. It was wonderful having him home. He got to visit our oldest daughter's new school, carry the younger one on his shoulders and cuddle his newborn son for a few days. We found ourselves at the airport again much too soon. I can't imagine what it was like for him to walk away from all of us for what we knew would be at least nine more months. For us, it was beyond painful.
To help me prepare for the longest stretch without Ian, my mother came for a couple of weeks. We cleared his things out of the closet and emptied his dresser so I would have more space. We packed up his office for use as a guest room. I don't run across his shoes anymore, or his books. I use a different, girlier bedspread. On my own, I've had to handle trips to the emergency room, school events, a mice infestation, car problems and sewage backup in the basement. When something goes wrong, my first instinct is no longer to consult Ian.
The kids are getting by, too, but not without sacrifices. Quinn won't know his father at all when he gets home. Our baby boy, now four months old and full of smiles and giggles, is sweet and remarkable, but Ian won't have any firsthand memories of him at this stage. Instead of holding the baby's pudgy hands and feeling that warm weight in his arms, Ian just has some emailed jpegs and the home movies I send him on DVD.
©2007 Korinthia Klein and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Korinthia Klein is a violin maker and mother of three in Milwaukee, WI. She and her husband are currently collaborating on a book chronicling both their experiences during his deployment in Iraq. |
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