Hail-o Kitty

One of my biggest anxieties when we found out that Stud would be deploying again was the fact that I would be living alone. When he first deployed, I was in my last semester of college and after that I lived at home. I never felt scared or anxious about my safety. If something happened, I was surrounded by people who could help or at least communicate the situation to get help.

Living alone is one of the many factors that make this deployment to Afghanistan a totally different situation for us than his first deployment.

1. We're married. When Stud went to Iraq we had gotten engaged right before he left so not only was I not recognized legally by the USMC as his dependent or family but more importantly I was planning a wedding mostly alone!

2. I have a full-time job. My last semester of college only took up about two months of my time while was he gone last time. After that I spent months looking for a job...which I finally landed about two weeks before he came home. All of that downtime really seemed to make things worse.

3. We have our own place. A blessing and a source of anxiety at the same time. It's awesome to have my own place while he's gone but I also worry about having to handle emergencies and bad guys criminals if they were to come up.

4. Experience is a great teacher. Not only have we already been through a deployment but we've been married for a little over a year and have been able to learn more about each other and the way the military works in that time.

All things considered, we are in a better position this time around and we know that no matter what, God will sustain us. Even if we were somehow in a worse position heading into this deployment, trusting God and leaning on His truth is the only surefire way to succeed at anything. Even in the suckiest of situations, we are better off if we know God than we are not knowing God in the best of situations. Fact.

That being said, I still get a little freaked out a times and as much comfort and companionship as I get from our two lovely lady cats, Analie (Ana) and Derby, even they can be a source of anxiety. They're living "situation gauges." You can always tell how they feel because their emotion is written all over their fury little bodies. They purr and close their eyes when they're happy, they meow and rub against your legs when they want love food, and their hair rises and they arch their back when they're trying to intimidate one another -- you've gotta know that Ana has a nub for a tail so it turns into a pom pom when she's riled up. It's usually pretty easy to tell what's going on with the girls...especially since the expression I see most often is unconcerned languidness. In fact, here is a snapshot of the lounging ladies from last night:

They're fine. They're happy. They're mellow. Even though I know they're just cats, their attitude draws me in and I feel more relaxed when they're relaxed. Humans are cue-readers. We scan each other looking for information. Just try standing in the middle of the mall and looking up at the ceiling for a few minutes and see how many people walking by will look up to see what you're looking at. We all seek information and reading peoples reactions to situations can be a bigger source of information than the physical cues of the situation itself. We got to watch a video in my college Social Psych course of an experiment of the power of situational cues. The subject was asked to wait in a room with several other people who were in on the experiment. After waiting for a short time, smoke started entering the room from under a door across the room from the door the subject entered. The subject sees the smoke but looks around to see how the other people in the room react. The other people remain seated, acting totally indifferent and unmoved by the now-increasing smoke entering the room. What does the subject do? Does he run from the room yelling fire? Does he inform the other people that he sees smoke or ask what's going on? In several different trials, the subject remained seated being so over-powered by the "information" he was receiving from the others in the room, the cues telling him that there was nothing to worry about, that he ignored his own common sense. We saw that video and thought those subjects were crazy! But we all put more stock in the actions and reactions of others than we care to admit.

Now I hate to relate that all back to my silly cats but cats have expression too! So this is what happened. We three ladies were having a quite evening. I was working on my laptop in the living room and they were chillin'. All of a sudden I look out our sliding glass door to the porch and see a curtain of rain fall almost instantly. The cats were fine with that but when the thumping of hail hitting the roof followed, this is what I saw:

The poor girls didn't know what to think. Derby put on her detective hat and cautiously explored the porch with me but Ana retreated under the bed. Luckily in this situation I didn't have to rely on the cues of my cats alone to tell me if I should be worried, knowing so much more about weather than they do. Ha! But imagine what I might have felt if I hadn't known what was going on. When the living things around you show signs of fear, it can be hard to not feel a little fear yourself.

Come on. Look at that face:

You might think something were up too if you saw that.

Anyway, the tornado sirens went off and I locked us all in the bathroom (which didn't go over well with the cats) but it passed and we were all fine. So back to the point, I can't say I wasn't thinking about the outer wall of our apartment being torn off and not having my hubby home to help me deal with it. This living alone thing will have its ups and downs for sure. I am confident, though, that this isn't a novel anxiety. God's in control of this too and I figure as long as we're commanded to "Cast all your anxiety on Him for he cares for you," it's probably a good plan of action. Even if there is some hail sometimes.

I saved that piece in my freezer. Is that weird? I told myself it's so that I could show Stud when he comes home for his ten-day leave between training and deploying...I think I just secretly wanted to keep it for no good reason.