Band-aids

I’m sitting here thinking about the events of the weekend and how I am so glad to finally be on the train.

I have my sunglasses on so no one can see my eyes are swollen with tears. I wish I was home already so I could do the undignified mascara running, snot dripping, talking in hiccuppy sentences cry. Cries like the ones you use to do when you were a kid and God forbid you miss the ice-cream truck and all of your friends are happily parading their freeze pops in your face and teasing you unmercifully.

But, instead I hold back so I am not furthermore known as the “crazy crying woman on the train” that some other blogger writes about. I hold back like I’ve been doing all weekend so the kids wouldnt see me all emo.

I was putting a band-aid on my niece Amaya this morning and she asked me why I looked sad. I lied and told her it was because my back was hurting and she asked me if I wanted a band-aid cause they always make her hurts feel better. I didn’t want her to worry cause her Auntie was distressed at the thought of her Daddy going away to Afghanistan (thank god for spell check cause I can never spell it right. As many times as I have to write it you would think I would know but it’s as if my mind wants to block out any comprehension of this country, let alone how to spell it) again.

I feel guilty that I am even allowing myself the luxury of sadness when it’s really my sister n law that has the real burden of being separated from her husband, lover and best friend till February. It is her that has to take care of 3 little ones who are already acting out today because they don’t understand why Daddy must go to “work” and won’t be back for a very long time.

The scene at the train station went better than expected. Amon is the last one I hug and I don’t want to let go. He laughs to stop me from crying and tells me he will be fine. He jokes that he is just going on a vacation and time will fly by. That he will email me often and send pic updates via Myspace. I nod and wipe my face because we all have to be strong for the kids.

I’ll try to sleep on the train but I know I won’t be able to. I know that there will be many more sleepless nights ahead until he is back again. I just hope I don’t have to go back to taking pills to keep the nightmares at bay.

I start to think about that real life nightmare when he was about 3 years old and I allowed him to wander off at the park instead of watching him like I was supposed to do. Our parents and everyone else in shouting distance looked for him for over an hour. I remember being so scared at the thought of him being lost forever. But being the smart ass that he was (and still is) he found a policeman and told him that “his mommy and daddy were lost and he needed help finding them”.

Thank God that story had a happy ending but the thought that his mommy and daddy are still perpetually “lost” and I am the only one in our immediate family to make the effort to see him off before deployment …makes me sad.

The thought of all those other children who are now living without fathers because they never came back from the same place he is going back to today….makes me sad.

But more so than anything the thought of my Little Boy Blue possibly not being able to find his way back home this time around makes my heart hurt and there isn’t a band-aid in the world big enough to fix it right now.