We have five weeks.

But not really, because we won’t get to Fort Irwin for another two weeks, and that’s if we’re lucky. After a week of playing the moving company hokey-pokey, we still don’t have confirmation that the movers will get here on the day we need them to in order to get me there on time to sign the lease on the duplex.

And there’s a good chance Dad will be out in the field when we get there.

So that leaves two, three weeks tops together before Dad deploys to Afghanistan.

He got word today. End of August.

Crap.

We knew it would be soon. Dad told me not to bother to hope he’d be home at Christmas. But even he thought we’d have two months. Long enough to see Big Guy start first grade, long enough to have a bit of summer with his boys.

Crap.

For roughly 3.6 seconds I wondered if we should call off the move. The biggest consolation to Big Guy – who’s realized for months how much he’ll miss his school, his friends, his karate class, all the things we’re used to doing – was being together as family.

Now it turns out that the time together is going to be yet another brief stolen moment, the kind we’ve specialized in since January. There were two weekend visits after basic training graduation and 17 days after advanced training – a “vacation” highlighted by emergency-room visits and stomach flu.

And that’s why we’re going to go ahead with the move. Two or three weeks is better than the nothing we’ll get for the next year.

It probably won’t be long enough to set up our fantasy patio, and it definitely won’t be enough for Dad to see Big Guy start first grade.

But it’s more than we’d have if parts of our family remained scattered 370 miles apart.

Copyright 2009 Debra Legg. All rights reserved.

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