Hands down, the most difficult part of deployment for me is the three or four days I go between every email, the weeks between phone calls, and the Skyping... never. We had gmail chat for a few blissful weeks, but now that's gone too.
The physical separation is just nothing compared to the separation you feel when all you want to do is snuggle up on the phone with him for an hour every night, and all he's able to give is... well, much less than that.
I know from reading other deployment posts around the web that not every deployment is the same in this respect. Some women report (even though there are plenty of men left on the home front they aren't representing on the web) getting phone calls every other day and being allowed to Skype. But the bases our men are operating from are different in operations, regulations, and available facilities. Our guys are doing different jobs. Even the locations of those posts probably influence how much time he can spend chatting with us. I know Adam is working extremely hard, and if I had to choose between him getting enough sleep and calling me for some emotional reassurance, I would want him to choose sleep. He has to take care of himself first, so he can be at his best, so he can come home safely, and then we can take care of each other.
So I promised at the beginning I would try not to whine, and this sounds like a whine. Maybe I can redeem myself with a moral. At least we're not fighting, because we haven't been through a deployment fight yet and I've heard that they are bad news. So for the moral, let's use the old rule of quality over quantity, and being thankful for what we've got, including a wonderful man that I want to talk to in the first place.
