Thursday, October 9, 2008

I'm not sayin it's gonna be easy

Ok friends, as I read my recent posts I realize that I have a pretty positive perspective on deployment, because, after all we are almost done with ours!

And as excited as I am, and as much as I want to encourage you that you can survive and your deployment can be a good thing, yes a good thing I want you to know that I am not all chipper happy camper sunshine and butterflies all the time.

Just yesterday I freaked out on the phone with Rob because I am so sick and tired of doing our family finances by myself. It really, really, really stresses me out.

Money is tight, and I get super stressed about paying bills and buying things for myself. Even when I buy the necessities I tend to feel a little guilty. I don’t know why! I can’t help that diapers, formula and baby food adds up to $70 or $80. I can’t help that I need sustenance to survive. But I want so badly to handle our finances perfectly and that just isn’t going to happen. I need to relinquish control and realize that it is ok for me to spend $10 on a new shirt off the clearance rack at Target. Life will go on if we aren’t completely debt free by 2011. Life happens and it costs money too.

You may or may not relate with my stress over our budget but I just wanted to share it with you. I can be a total stress case. I have shouted out that I HATE the Army, I HATE this deployment and all I want is Rob to come home. I have shouted it out because I have my days and my moments when that is all I feel, when I am encompassed in the darkness of deployment.

But the moments of sunshine, of Max snuggling with me and saying DaDa, of Rob laughing at a story of our crazy life, of the pride I feel when I see any military family surviving and thriving have started to outweigh the pain and the darkness. And that is why I choose to encourage you most of the time. But don’t ever feel like I have this all figured out, because I assure you that I don’t.
Not even close.
Always,

1 comment:

it's me, just me, nothing fancy, just simple me said...

i'm right there with ya, sorta. aaron is in control of our finances, but i like it that way. and being that we bank with usaa, he can see our moneys right on his laptop just as well as i can see it here on my laptop.

before aaron deployed, we sat down and wrote out our budget for while he is gone. and when he came home for r&r (and i took him grocery shopping and had him fill the gas tank), we revisited our budget. i can't say i've been completely faithly to sticking to every penny on the budget, but heck, we've got to eat.

aaron's so funny. at least once a month he MAKES me buy something for myself. he knows that i use my budgetted 'jackie's money only' for him and cayman. so, once a month he says i need to at least treat myself whether it's that shirt that's finally 70% off or a small frapp from starbucks.

but it's hard when you feel like all you do is spend 'his' money while you stay home with the little money. i know it's 'our' money. but still. i hate that he's missing out on buying things for cayman: the diapers, his birthday presents, pictures, and the list goes on. we waited until aaron came home for r&r to buy cayman's bed (he'd been sleeping in his pack-n-play since we moved back home shortly after the deployment) so that aaron could be part of the process, not just a distant on-looker reading about it on cayman's blog or during our msn live conference.