Museum of Naval Aviation, Pensacola, FL
8/7/07 2pm

I am in the cockpit of a T-2 Buckeye, thinking about your training flights which happened just around the corner from this building. Remembering all those index cards I helped you memorize- emergency procedures, landing protocol, etc. You knew all of that information forward and backward. It blew me away that you learned all of that. By heart.

In chasing your dreams (Affair) you killed mine. After 9 years, this was my life- I was firmly entrenched and committed. It’s what I’d been trained for. It’s the life I had, too- it wasn’t just yours! Names of planes still run together in my mind~ F-4 Phantom, A-6 Intruder, C-5 Galaxy (this made sense the night one flew over our small apartment on the beach- watching it fill the skylight in the dead of night, so big and slow I thought it would certainly fall from the sky on we three- for our daughter was there, we just didn’t know it yet). I gave my life to yours- I gave my dreams to you. I put them in a cardboard box, closed the lid with tape and gave them to you for storing. You put them high on a shelf in the closet, marked them “Save for later,” not “Discard.” I thought that was Real.

I put my energy and love and support into your life, your career, your focus, and our children and home. I think all the time about how you abandoned the children, but I seldom think about what it did to me. So many spouses leave each other, really, who cares about that when there are children involved? As long as both parents keep the children the primary focus- and you didn’t, and that’s what slayed me. But today… today I was reminded- as I always am when I get near the military- that while I didn’t sign the papers accepting a commission to be an officer in the U.S. Navy, I might as well have, for I was not just the mercenary wife (and we’ve both known some of those) but the involved one. The one who read and re-read and edited your fitness reports and letters and documents. The one who got up at 4am to make breakfast for you before a pre-dawn brief when she couldn’t stomach the thought of food, eight weeks pregnant with your first child. The one who made food for squadron-mates when they were ill or had new babies. The one who filled in blocks on a quilt to send off when you were at sea for four months, or six. Who quietly nursed the baby in the middle of the night thinking about how to fill the next day for the other two babies sleeping. Who vacuumed the house Saturday morning while watching all the daddies in the neighborhood mowing the grass, or playing catch with their kids, or packing up for a day on the beach, or the boat. We had no Saturday Morning Daddy. We had no Anyday Daddy for twenty-six weeks straight, and that year for probably a total of almost forty weeks if we add it up. Maybe more. I avoided the calendar.

Today, sitting in the cockpit of that trainer, and watching our kids in a Blue Angels simulator (remembering your description of their brief- which still awes me- and thinking about Chicken Bone, who died in one of those blue jets) and thinking of standing there next to you in that very atrium of the museum I was now chasing our kids around- today what you did to my life, to me, was not okay. Fifteen years ago I stood so proudly in that atrium, in that awful blue maternity dress you were angry I spent money on (but it was on sale, and what was I going to wear to the ceremony?), eight months pregnant with our daughter, watching your father pin your wings on your uniform and wondering- though doubting, and convincing myself it was okay if you didn’t- if you had bought me the gold aviator wings on a necklace, as I’d seen around the necks of other aviator’s wives (you hadn’t- you’d run out of time- a punch to my gut). Today it was not okay that you really smeared my life through the dust while you were at it recreating (both definitions) yours.

Seven years ago we were chasing our kids around this museum- one yet unborn but present- and I was unaware that Someone Else had joined, in a sense, our marriage covenant. I was tucking our children into bed in a cottage on the beach that vacation, while you were running off to (uncharacteristically) buy things~ more pails for the beach, her favorite ice-cream for your pregnant wife, another pacifier for our youngest son. But really to just make phone calls to the Affair. To affirm your love and affection, and to declare yourself, again and again, a malcontent in the current state of your life (married, with children). You were swinging your fists, but I was blind with the sweat running into my eyes, and deaf with the lullabies I sang to our sweet, sweet babes, and dumb with just never, ever, EVER thinking This Could Happen To Me.

Flight bags, flight suits (”I wear pajamas to work!” you guys always said), flight boots- all of it floods my senses with the most piquant deja vu. I was here before, I did all of this before, I wore different skin, I was a different thing. You left, and ripped from me this major part of my identity, and you took it and I’ll never have it back. It was as if you took an organ- maybe not a major one, as I am still alive and functioning- but a lesser one, and I suspect I will always, in certain circumstances, feel the void. I am no longer a member of this Club. My children are still the sons and daughters of a Naval Aviator, but I’m no part of it- nor is my part acknowledged. It’s the sucker punch I never could’ve imagined.

In the museum store, the children are racing to and fro looking at the offerings. “What’s this, Mom?” asks Hope, my Seven. As always, I’m saved by Hope. “I think it’s a bouncy ball,” I reply, as I pick up a blue-and-green ball from the bin, “And look, this one is the whole world!” “Made in CHINA,” she retorts as she runs off. I look down at the ball and see the word CHINA stamped over South America. My burst-out-loud laugh saves my day. Mirth is still mine in these aviator’s children; I grabbed my cardboard box as you went out the door, and it’s time to blow off the dust, rip off the tape, and bravely pull back the lid, losses be damned- for perhaps they are gains for us all.

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