A Bad Dream?

Yesterday started out so nicely. I was feeling very motivated to work on some new designs and products for my etsy shop and to work on our family budget with Isaac. I worked the morning away and before I knew it, Isaac was up.

I was upstairs calculating our expenses so far this month when I heard his phone ring. About 10 minutes later he came up the stairs and said that he had something to tell me that I probably wasn't going to like. He had just received a call from his First SGT and Isaac was put on a list to be mobilized to Iraq. At first, I don't think I really believed him. I knew that some of his soldiers were going because he had received an email on Friday that 8 of his lower ranking soldiers were being called up to join another unit. However, they didn't request anyone with a ranking as high as Isaac's so we thought he was safe. Well, for one reason or another, there are a lot of soldiers in his platoon that don't qualify to be deployed (because they are terrible soldiers that never get there paperwork and tests done on time and generally just suck at life) so they decided to take Isaac since they didn't have the number of lower ranking soldiers that had been requested.

Then he told me that he'll have to start flying to Texas in February to do his monthly battle assembly with the new unit. That's when I started to freak out. The March battle assembly is the weekend that Noah is supposed to be born and Isaac was going to just make it up later in the month. I don't know if he'll be able to do that now or not. I cannot have our first child without my husband present. I just can't do it and at this point I started crying. He continued to tell me that he would have to go from training in June and July and then his deployment would start in September. He'll miss Noah's first everything, first Thanksgiving, first Christmas, first birthday. Plus, I'll be essentially a single mom for a year. I don't want to be a single mom. That's why I waited to have children until I was married and we were settled. I mean, by the time Isaac comes back, Noah will have no idea who he is. How heartbreaking is it that my son will not know who his father is?

I realize that we are not the first and will not be the last family to go through this situation. I know that many women have given birth while their husbands were in Iraq either watching on a web-cam or not present at all. I know there are countless fathers who have missed years of their young childrens' lives but I just don't want to be one of those women.

And I'm just so irritated at the recruiter who got Isaac into this unit with all his promises that the unit wouldn't deploy, but if it did they would only deploy to Hawaii to replace the full time Army there. In all his scare tactics about not going into the IRR because you'll be mobilized so join this Reserve Unit so you'll be safe, he never once mentioned that you can still be mobilized if any bigger company requests soldiers from your unit. AND we got screwed out of the $10,000 bonus for signing a 3 year contract because the guy wrote it 3 days short of the full 3 year period. So Isaac didn't get a cent for this.

I just feel like this is all one really bad dream and that when Isaac wakes up this morning he'll come downstairs and not know what I'm talking about.