After spending 24 hours a day for seven days a week for four weeks a month for 16 months of deployment learning how to wait, you’d think small increments of time like an hour and a half would just fly by.
But standing in that Alert Holding Area on Fort Wainwright Tuesday night, 90 minutes felt like an eternity.
I guess patience isn’t exactly in large supply when you are anticipating the imminent return of your husband from Iraq.
Standing amid the other moms and dads and spouses and children who were also impatiently awaiting the arrival of loved ones, I found myself fidgety.
I picked up Connor and then put him back down every five minutes, and I must have readjusted the belt and buttons on my black and red welcome home dress at least 50 times.
Every moment felt like another extension and every minute felt like another deployment. I talked a million miles a minute, and I must have asked my friend at least 20 times if the soldiers had left Eielson Air Force Base yet to head to Fort Wainwright.
I detested the anticipation.
I had so many emotions built up inside from 16 months of missing my husband like crazy and was experiencing this physical longing stronger than anything else I’d ever known to just touch him, hug him and hold him.
Which is maybe why, when the Army band began to play and those three magic garage doors simultaneously began to open, I broke down into tears.
I cried as the nearly 200 soldiers disembarked the buses that transported them from Eielson as the crowd erupted in cheers and the families burst into applause. I wept as the soldiers made their formation on the far side of the room, and I sobbed as they marched across that hangar-like area to their place in front of us.
And when their commander released them to their families, I broke down.
Soldiers sprinted toward us, frantically searching for their families, and in the crowd, I just couldn’t see my husband. He wasn’t in the very front, he wasn’t in the very back, he wasn’t near his old commander, he wasn’t near anyone else I knew.
I was starting to panic, when all of a sudden, two soldiers cleared my path of vision and for the first time, I spotted him. I literally lost my breath. My heart fluttered the way it did the first time I met my husband, and I felt just like that 18-year-old girl again as we made eye contact for the first time.
My heart dropped, and my husband beamed.
I’ve never run so fast with a child in my arms in my entire mommy life. I had tunnel vision as I trotted toward the man of my dreams and flung my one arm around his neck as he embraced the two of us with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen from a man in uniform.
He held us tight, told me through giant smiling teeth that he loved me and missed me, and then pulled away to look down at his son for the first time since he was 11 days old. And in an act that I’m positive must have been from God, Connor looked up at his daddy and smiled as if Matt had been a physical part of his life for all eight months.
I cried. Then I laughed. Then I smiled. Then I shed another tear.
We hugged, we kissed, we stared at the beautiful life we had created together.
And when it was all said and done and our run-leap-hug maneuver was complete, we walked out of that AHA, hand in hand, with our worlds once again connected and our love once again in tangible form.
There’s no more counting down the days “until they come home.”
My hero is home, and my life is once again complete.
Local freelance writer Michelle Cuthrell wrote weekly columns about life as a military spouse while her husband, a lieutenant with the 2-1 Infantry Battalion, was deployed with the 172nd Stryker Brigade. This column appeared Dec. 8, 2006.