We’re about two weeks out from opening night on the Full Monty, so needless to say, I’m not doing much else with my spare time. We’re supposed to be off book now, and the set is just being rolled in (we hope!) today. So today’s rehearsal should be… interesting. And rather long. But it’s days like this when things start coming together, so I can’t really complain.
But I can complain about this: Hubby was just put on alert that he’s going to be deployed again. I actually started blogging the first time while he was away the first time. We didn’t get to talk (real time) as often as I would have liked, so when something funny (or really really annoying) happened, I would blog about it so he could read it when he logged on during his free time (which was usually while I was sleeping). We’re not really looking forward to a computer-to-computer relationship again. We thought it was going to be at least three to five years before his number would come up again, but here we are. So we’ll deal. This time, the only blessing is that we’re familiar with the process, and we know better than to put things off til the last minute. Last time, we kind of moved forward in this fog of not knowing what to expect, not really believing it was happening (which is all part of the deployment cycle actually), and at the last minute we ended up ending a bad lease and moving house just four days before he left for his mobilization station. That was awful and we moved out of that house just a couple months after he got home because it never felt right! Luckily we own our home now, and we won’t have to worry about a bad renting situation while he’s gone. We have maybe a year to get things in order, and we’re logging some projects around the house – things that need to be taken care of before he’s gone for a year or more. Not exactly what we want to be thinking about over the holiday season, but then is there ever a good time to have a family member go over there? Not really.
So this makes me think about my next writing project. I’ve been wanting to write the war, and I’ve had some characters swimming around in my head ever since spring ’07 before Hubby got home. Actually starting the story has been a problem even though I have a good idea of the conflicts and plot impetus. I think the reason I can’t go there is because it’s a really dark place that’s very personal and I’ve needed to put it behind me to pull my family back together. Hubby and I have spent the past year trying to forget the emotional hell we went through while he was gone. And I like to think we’ve done a bang-up job. We bought a house (which like I said, was a huge source of discontent for both of us while he was gone before) and the boys are finally doing a lot better. But obviously, I’m going to be living in that moment again with my kids, and he’s going to feel all disconnected – and I’m not looking forward to it, but that’s how it is. I’ve known since he left the first time that I’d need to write about it in order to square that experience away for myself. So I’m planning to finish up Heart on Fire, which is pretty much stalled since I started Full Monty (because I can really only create one thing at a time, and even with a small part, a play is creatively exhausting), and once that’s finished, I might be ready to start this piece.
