Reservation for One: Deployment as a Reservist's Wife

Hello! 
My name is Meghan, and this is my first blog so you will seriously have to bear with me as I try to make this better and more interesting. 

Here is why I have decided to start a blog:
My husband is in the Navy Reserves and is deploying in the Spring (due to confidentiality, I can't post details or dates). This is our second deployment, our first was 6 months after we got married. James was in Kuwait for 10 months. I was just 23 then and didn't know how to be on my own, I never had been. I hadn't been without James since we got together when I was 19. Long story short, when he left, my world fell apart and I spent the next year trying to learn how to survive on my own and face daily lift as what the military books call "a geographical bachelorette." The whole experience was incredibly challenging. So now, as we come up on our second deployment I feel much more prepared and have a different outlook. I know it will be incredibly challenging and test who I am as a person and our marriage. Life is never the same after deployment. So, this blog is twofold in it's purpose. 1. I want to keep a blog to document my journey through this time, what I go through and what I accomplish, including personal triumphs as well as projects I complete and so on. 2. I don't want other Reservists wife to experience what I went through the first deployment. I want to write my experiences so that other spouses have someone to feel connected to, so they can know that someone is going through the same thing. I want to offer what advice I can, and receive advice from others! Deployment sucks, and one of the best ways to make it suck a little less is to feel connected to others going through the same thing.

Reservation for One:
Being a Reservist's Wife is especially challenging. In the Reserves, we don't live on bases, we aren't surrounded by other military families, and some of us are even hours away from the nearest base or Reserve Center so Family Readiness Groups or support groups are not easy to get to. Many of us also don't deal with deployment regularly. For my husband and I, unless he volunteers, it's every 4 years and he is deployed for 10 months or even a year! And not dealing with deployment regularly means that we live most of our lives in a "normal" state with our spouses home, and the deployment is an incredible shock to our systems and daily lives! So, here we are, the wives left at home. No other military wife in sight who understands. And while we have amazing friends and co-workers who try to be supportive, the pain and loneliness is still foreign to them. Then, of course, there are the people who REALLY don't understand and say ridiculous and inappropriate things (I know we've all experienced that).

Well, screw all that. I'm ready to find new ways to deal with this!