The Long Way Home

by Scott, Jessica

  I’m kind of proud of myself in that I’ve stayed calm and quiet all week. Those of you that know me know this is not my normal operating procedure but I’ve been focused on the kids this week.

  But I’ve got to tell you, sitting there holding my little girl as she sobbed her heart out damn near broke me. Looking back on 2003 when my husband and I first found out I was pregnant, I never would have thought we’d go through seven years of back to back deployments and still be married to each other. It feels like each homecoming has its own challenges and each deployment brings a new stress. It was tough being home with the girls when they were babies but they didn’t know what was missing in their lives.

  This time they know. And they both have a Daddy-sized hole in their lives that I cannot fill no matter what I try. And trust me, I’m trying. We painted the bathroom together tonight. Three of us cramped into a tiny little space, the two of them standing on a torn up t-shirt splattering paint everywhere (they actually did a pretty good job). But what got my oldest thinking about Daddy? Mommy screwed up. I suggested that she write to him and tell him about us painting the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later, she’s bawling her little heart out and breaking mine. And she knows it’s only been a week. She’s still got a year to get through.

  It was so much easier when it was projectile vomit and diapers at midnight. This? This is so much worse.

  The Social Networking Ick Factor

  February 22, 2011

  TODAY’S POST WAS SUPPOSED to be on the rituals that keep us sane. But in light of messages that have been hitting my inbox lately, I’ve opted for a different topic of conversation. Maybe this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Maybe I should simply accept that putting myself out there on social networking sites as a writer means I’m going to get weird emails from random people.

  But seriously, I think something is going around. In the last two weeks, I’ve gotten four emails from random guys looking to hook up via Facebook. Okay, I got it, my husband is deployed. But seriously, that is not code for I’m looking for a booty call. Oh, and in case anyone has any delusions about showing up at my house looking for some action, you’ll find it. But trust me when I tell you it won’t be what you thought you were getting.

  I don’t get this. I really don’t. What’s the right way to respond, other than delete? I’m a writer, I’m used to living with crazy inside my head every single day but this? This is beyond weird. And in today’s day and age, are people really just hooking up via Facebook? People really do this?

  The Deployment Rituals that Keep Us Sane

  February 21, 2011

  I’m discovering that I have certain deployment rituals, things that give me a sense of comfort in the world that now has a husband-sized hole in it. This is the first deployment that he’s been gone that I haven’t been pregnant or with him, so the possibilities of things I can get into around the house are endless.

  It usually doesn’t take but a week, sometimes less, before I start spraying the pillow with his cologne. Or wearing his clothing. Or moving to the middle of the bed and get used to cats sleeping all over me.

  But it’s the impulse to do home-improvement projects that baffle me. Each time he’s been gone prior to this one, I’ve re-grouted my kitchen. I’ve landscaped. I’ve “fixed” things. First weekend he was gone, I bought several cans of paint and a few more trial colors. Managed to paint the guest bathroom a really great deep blue. The kids had fun painting. Made a horrible mess, but I guess that’s half their fun, right? Then today, I cracked open the box o’ hell that’s been filling up my garage for the last week or so.

  I'm building my kids a swingset. You know, one of those monstrous wooden ones? Yeah, cause that's my idea of a good time.

  Thank heavens I’ve got friends willing to spend an afternoon in the hot Texas sun, helping me piece together a ginormous puzzle. And we only made it about a third of the way through, but it was a great way to spend the afternoon, at least on my part. My kids had a blast (and the heat took it right out of them, so there were no bedtime battles this evening), and it was so relaxing working on a project with friends.

  I guess at the heart of it, the home improvement projects are my way of exerting a teeny bit of control over my world. I wish he was here with me building that stupid swingset. We laugh when we do things together, even though I always manage to start projects off wrong, like in the middle of the instruction book instead of at the front (don’t ask). But at the end of the day, it’s my way of staying busy so I don’t notice that the TV isn’t on, that he isn’t fighting with the cat, or playing Super Mario Brothers with our oldest.

  One week down, fifty-one to go.

  The Swing-set from Hell...

  February 26, 2011

  OKAY, SO THE NEXT time I raise my hand and say, I think I’ll build my kids a swing-set, someone slap me.

  Everything hurts. When I say everything, I mean from the top of my head where I hit it multiple times today to the top of my feet where I dropped a power tool on one of them. But in my heart, there’s a deep-seated feeling of holy cow, I did that.

  Of course I had help. What do you think I am, Wonder Woman? Last weekend some very kind friends suffered through burned chicken and crappy potato salad for six hours to help me get the frame built. Thank heavens there was someone there who knew how to read directions... because you and I both know I skipped a very important step and spent a good hour and a half sorting through to fix it.

  Today I started at about 6:30 in the morning and worked until 7pm. I would have kept going on that expletive-deleted slide but I ran out of daylight. Probably just as well.

  But it’s almost finished. Mom and I even managed to get the roof on without anyone going to the emergency room. Which, if you know me and my mom, you know is pretty freaking amazing. But now I can look out in my backyard and see this massive monstrosity filling the spot where the grass never grew anyway and watch my kids climb all over it.

  I still have to finish that expletive-deleted slide. And put the actual swing-set piece onto it. But it’s almost done. It’s this massive wooden puzzle that comes in about two hundred pieces, not counting screws and bolts. Right now, I’m too tired to get up and move.

  The very best part about this whole thing is that my kids might complain. They might whine. But they’ve told everyone who will listen that Mommy built them a swing-set after Daddy left for Iraq.

  And that, folks is something they’ll remember. It will be a good memory, despite Daddy being gone. And really, isn’t that all I can do?

  Now someone hand me a Vicodin and a heating pad.

  The Adventures of Stunt Baby

  March 7, 2011

  THE WEEKEND STARTED FOR me at 0200 Saturday morning as I hopped in a vehicle and headed to the Tucson Airport for my flight back to Fort Hood. After landing in Dallas, I get a phone call from my mom, who’d been watching the girls for me while I had my TDY trip.

  This phone call informed me that my youngest had fallen from the top bunk onto the hardwood floor. Then she threw up. So Mom, being the awesome Grammy that she is, was taking her to the ER, oldest daughter in tow. I spent the entire flight from Dallas to Killeen researching head injuries and willing the plane to land. As I’m leaving the airport, I get the word that they’re doing a CT scan.

  This is not good. An hour after I get to the hospital, they’re calling in the airlift and we’re airborne, being life-flighted to Dell Children's Hospital in Austin. Two days later, we’re still here, my youngest in a neck brace (which my oldest calls her cat collar), and me in the same clothes I flew out of Tucson in Friday night.

  You want to talk about Mommy guilt? How about when I left the girls with my mom in 2007, I nearly canceled out of Officer Candidate School because my youngest had a fever and Mom had to take her to the ER to get it down. While deployed in 2009, my youngest once more sent me into a panic by having to be rushed to the ER for splitting her thumb open. In early 2010, right after we both got home from Iraq, we were back ag
ain for a broken arm. And now this: a fractured skull.

  So we’re sitting in Dell Children’s (which is amazing) while my back-to-normal-except-for-the-broken-bones-in-her-skull four year old argues with nurses, begs for cookies, and all the way around continues to scare the daylights out of me.

  The decision to stay in the military has never been an easy one but weekends like this, when I’m not home and bad accidents happen, make me consider all things differently. I won’t try to say I stayed all calm and collected on the flight down. I fell apart. Completely. And then adrenaline kicked in and I had to make decisions. Yes, allow the CT scan. Yes, give her the anti-nausea meds. And worst of all, if I couldn’t get on the flight with her, take my four year old to an Austin hospital without me because they might have had to operate. What do I email my husband? Do I say, “Call home, ASAP,” or do I give him details so he has information (turns out, he’d rather have the “Call home ASAP” email with no details).

  All this happened on two hours of sleep and a whole lot of adrenaline. I’m happy to say that she’s doing fine. She just called room service and asked for more bacon. She’s been hogging the iPad and watching How To Train Your Dragon for the eighteenth time (luckily, I love that movie, so it hasn’t been a sacrifice).

  She's been hospitalized five times since she was born and this is her fourth broken bone (a thumb, two bones in her wobbly arm, and now her skull). Hopefully we’ll head home today but you know, I’d rather keep her in the hospital.

  Just to keep her getting into anything else before her head is fully healed.

  So Many Awesome Medical Folks

  March 8, 2011

  OKAY, SO THE TRAUMA of the weekend calls for several heroes across the board, starting with the ER staff at Darnall, who took such proactive care of my littlest stunt baby. Head injuries can be bad but so often are simply a knock on the head. Darnall ER did a CT scan to be proactive and discovered the fractured skull and immediately called for MedEvac to Austin.

  The air evacuation team was so friendly and kind to my daughter. Granted she was almost asleep the entire flight but they made sure she was delivered safe and sound, with Mommy along for the nerve-wracking but incredibly smooth flight.

  And the entire staff at Dell Children’s Hospital is incredible. Starting with Joe in the ER, who kept checking on my little girl and on me. I don’t know if he was just extra nice or if that was his normal demeanor but I am so grateful to him and the emergency folks there. The amazing thing about Dell Children's hospital is that my daughter had assigned nurses for an entire shift. We saw the same people consistently, the same faces on the trauma team and the neurology team and the ICM team. I can’t even express how grateful I am for the exceptional care my kidlet has received here and I am so incredibly grateful to the entire team who helped make sure my little girl was going to be okay. It was a horribly stressful weekend and everyone here did so much to help ease my mind and that of my husband, who is just starting his fourth combat tour in Iraq.

  So to everyone who helped get my little girl to the right doctors at the right time, thank you.

  Standing Still...For Once

  March 14, 2011

  THOSE WHO KNOW ME know I have a hard time sitting still. I’ve always got something going on, something that prevents me from sitting down on the couch and vegging out. Which is odd because if you knew me as a teenager, you’d have said the exact opposite.

  But this last week and a half, I’ve taken time to just stop. I watched my daughter recover from her head injury (she’s still not fully healed but she sure is acting like she is) and the entire time I was in the hospital with her, I just sat. I watched How to Train Your Dragon a dozen times, I worried every time she coughed, but the over-arching need to be doing something was gone.

  It was a strange feeling for me. There was no pressing need to be anywhere or doing anything but sitting with her. She started pulling out of being ill about halfway through day two. She started climbing. She started drawing and wanting to get out of bed. And as she started getting back to normal, so did I. I started following work from the Crackberry. I chatted on Skype with my husband, keeping him appraised of her situation.

  It was odd for me to just sit with her. To not feel the need to distract myself from what I was doing right then. At that moment, the most important thing in the world was for me to be there, focused on her. And I guess I was. I am so incredibly grateful that she’s doing well. If you didn’t know her, you’d never know she had a fractured skull that was still healing. It was so hard for me to keep her in the house this weekend when the weather was beautiful but I did because, even though she might act fine, she still has several weeks left of healing to do.

  And my leave, thus far, has been anything but not busy. I’ve gone into work every day last week, dragging my kid with me. I never thought I’d be that company commander who traipsed her kids to the office but I am. I’m on leave and I’m still working but it doesn’t matter: my soldiers still see my kids in the office. I’m going to be lucky if I don’t have a daycare started in the back now. But emergencies happen and overall, my company has been really flexible when dealing with family issues. I like to think we give our soldiers the ability to parent and be soldiers. I know this is not the rule for the Army at large.

  Around the house, I’ve finally finished painting my kitchen and I painted my hallway, too. I think I’ve found a really nice cream/yellow for the living room. I fear yellow. It’s such a hard color to get right. But this color might do the trick. Hopefully, the husband likes it whenever he gets home from Iraq.

  And on the writing front, I’ve dug back into a novel I was working on back in Iraq. I cracked it open and while it needed a ton of work, I thought the guts were basically there. So I plotted that sucker out using Alexandra Sokoloff’s Screenwriting Tricks for Writers and set to work. I’m almost a third of the way through the revised first draft and it’s coming alive. I haven’t bounced it off my agent yet, though, so we’ll update y’all accordingly when the time comes. But he gets to see it first.

  As you can see, I’m back to being busy. Life only took a moment to stand still but it was a moment I’ll appreciate for years to come. I was alone and still with my baby girl, something that hasn’t happened in a long, long time. And here’s to committing that it won’t take intensive care for it to happen again, on a more regular basis.

  The Scenes that Stick With You

  March 16, 2011

  EVERYONE HAS THEIR FAVORITE books, right? Those books that make it to the vaunted keeper shelf, those books that make you smile every time you crack the cover to sit with a beloved friend. Those books are special to us in ways that non-readers cannot understand.

  But for me as a writer and a reader, there are often scenes that stick with me for some reason or another, haunting me and recurring for random, unknown reasons. These scenes are often something deeply emotional and powerful for me and are very often in my keeper books, but sometimes, they’re not. Usually if a scene sticks with me, the book finds its way to my keeper shelf, if only to give me the ability to reread that moment, to capture that emotional punch once more.

  There’s a scene in Kresley Cole’s Dark Desires After Dusk where Cade views Holly and sees her frantically arranging her medication. The heart of the scene for me was when he thinks of her with such a vulnerability in her need. He saw what some could say is a weakness and found it endearing, touching, and it made him see her in a new light.

  At the end of Laura Griffin’s Whisper of Warning, Courtney has to decide to trust Will enough to let him love her and she jumps into his arms. It sounds like something corny but in reality, Laura pulls off the most beautiful ending I think I’ve ever read. Courtney having to make the choice at that moment, with no time to think or to weigh the consequences. In the end, she has to trust and for that character, it was a major moment. It sticks with me because the reader finds herself rooting for Courtney, when in real life, they would probably be running away from her.<
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  At the end of Laura Kinsale’s Seize the Fire, Sheridan finds Olympia after she has finally had the revolution she seeks. Sheridan’s admission to Olympia about what he faced and how he can’t think of getting through the days without her moved me to tears the first time I read it and every time after that. Sheridan is such a complex character that when he finally admits to Olympia that he needs her because she needed him, just him and not the hero, he’s laying his heart out and hoping she’ll pick it up.

  Roxanne St Claire’s Edge of Sight was an incredibly moving book for me because she took a physically and emotionally scarred man and made him whole. There was no miracle cure for his wounds, no stunning reveal that makes everything all right. But one night, Zach simply rested his wounded face against Sam’s hair and it cooled the burn. The scene was so beautiful in its simplicity and moved me to tears.

  There’s a line in Skyler White’s and Falling, Fly right at the beginning where Olivia says “Desire is an angel in Hell.” That single line has stuck with me since the moment I first read it and and Falling, Fly is one of the most challenging, most thought-provoking books I’ve read recently. Olivia and Dominic’s sojourn in the Hotel of the Damned is one fascinating ride and I see new things each time I’ve read it.

  There are many more scenes out there that stick with me for some reason or another. Maybe they make me laugh, like Sarah Wendell’s comment in Beyond Heaving Bosoms about paranormal romances werewolf heroes making shoulder hair an acceptable fashion statement or how Julie Kenner’s demon-hunting soccer mom Kate is ready to kill over a bunny costume, a scene which had me in hysterics while I was deployed to Iraq.

  But these scenes or moments or beats in books stick with me. And when I’m looking to nail the landing, so to speak, these are the scenes I go back to, looking at what went right that caused them to stick in my mind.