The Law of Deployment is basically just a variation of Murphy's Law that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Except all those things that can go wrong will go wrong just as soon as your spouse leaves on deployment. I (and all of my military spouse friends) know it well.
For example, during my husband's first seven-month deployment - just a few months after we got married - I was bedridden with a serious back injury for weeks, our refrigerator leaked, the hot water heater broke, and the garage door stopped working. During his next deployment I managed to lock myself completely out of the house without even my cell phone on me, and I found a snake in our yard. (For those that don't know me, I do not do snakes.) Thankfully, the houses we lived in at that time were rentals so the landlords remedied most of the house issues, my neighbors helped me break in when I was locked out, and our yard guys at least made it such that I could avoid potential encounters with snakes for the rest of deployment. But you get the picture.
Now, my husband is on his shore tour. In Navy life, this is a tour that follows a "sea tour" or two during which deployments are frequent. During shore tour, my husband (in theory) does not deploy and basically works a job with "regular hours". But, he has had to take quite a few business trips in the year that we've been on shore tour. Some have been short, domestic trips, and others have been international trips of anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks. Most recently, he was gone for just three days. Compared to those seven-month deployments, three days is nothing, right? Right. Except now we have a baby. And while I take care of the baby full time during the day, it turns out that job is at least twice as hard when my husband isn't home in the evenings and early mornings to help. So I dread those business trips. And then came the real fun. How dare the Law of Deployment strike during shore tour?!
My husband left town on a Tuesday. We had started our cat on some new medicine the prior Sunday, but the cat waited until Tuesday to have a reaction to said medicine. And that reaction involved generally refusing to eat or drink anything, which concerned me for obvious reasons. But whenever I could persuade him to eat anything at all - even a tiny bite, even a literal single pellet of food - it resulted in incredible amounts of vomit that he would only leave on the carpet, never on a surface that would actually be easy to clean. This continued for over 24 hours, and clearly a trip to the vet was in order.
Normally, this is no big deal. My husband works very near our vet. He will drop the cat off on the way to work, and pick him up on the way home. But no such luck during Vomit Fest 2014. So, I load up my baby and my cat. Fortunately my baby is a great traveler, but my cat more than makes up for it with his pure, unadulterated hatred for being in his carrier and in the car. And it didn't help that despite being "Spring," the windchill was in the 20s with bands of heavy snow moving through the area. I drive to the vet and somehow manage to carry both baby in infant carrier and cat (who is heavier than baby) in cat carrier into the vet. I talk to the vet, drop off the cat, and rush - now late - to my new moms group meeting. After the meeting, my daughter and I have to cut lunch with the ladies short, as we need to run to Target before she needs to eat again. Why, you ask? Because of course we had run out of carpet cleaner - both kinds - that morning while trying to clean up the approximately 654th pile of vomit that week. So we run to Target, get more carpet cleaner, run home, scrub the carpet, Skype with the family for a bit, and feed the baby. The vet calls, and the cat is ready. So we repeat the exercise of transporting baby and cat in sub-freezing temperatures and finally return home for the day.
Perhaps you've seen this image before. It circulates frequently among military spouses on social media. But it's wrong. I'm a military wife, and I'd like to go on record today as saying it is hard. Or at least, it can be. The Law of Deployment: it's not just for military wives!
Also, just for the record, our cat has fully recovered, and my husband did steam clean the carpets once he returned home. Peace has returned to our home.
