Submarine Housewife
My husband travels. He has for years and though it comes and goes in spurts, over the course of the year he does not sit down to our table or sleep in my bed more than 60% of the time. That doesn’t seem like much to people whose loved ones are staged overseas for eighteen months at a time in harm’s way. But time away is relative. For me a week on the road is easy. For someone else four nights taking night school classes is too much. The point is, staying together when sleeping apart is a challenge that takes two to tackle. It is important to remember that in large part this is volunteer Navy. My husband consulted with me before he took the heavy travel job. We decided together that we could put up with the travel if the job would be exciting and rewarding and the remuneration was adequate. I agreed, and he agreed, to the duties assigned to each of us and withstand the necessary stresses associated with our positions.
A stay-at-home spouse of a traveler is called a Submarine Spouse. I am a Submarine Housewife. Envision a long term assignment to a military submarine. I live encapsulated in this perfectly designed machine. A whole family lives in here with me, breathing and eating and doing their jobs. They sleep here, they play here, they take up space. We come and go from our regular ports of call, we get messages from the outside and orders from the Command, but as a rule we are all serving here together for eighteen years or so. As the Captain of the vessel, I make sure that all the necessary things get done: the laundry, the dishes, the food, the school, little talks about kindness, bigger talks about sex. If there is a problem with the ship, I have ultimate responsibility. If we are at sea – and it almost always feel as if we are “at sea” - then I have to solve problems with the resources at hand and be responsible for it when we surface and report to Command. And if, as frequently happens in combat situations, Command was not there and is not positive that the Captain did the right thing, I am subject to cross examination. Luckily, Courts Martial (and Courts Marital) are expensive and nasty so we avoid them. So I go along, looking through my telescope at the surface world and trying to remember what it smells like. I breathe the same stale air and worry about the Warheads day in and day out. I occasionally get the pale and indistinct image of a fellow Submarine Housewife on my radar and I “ping” against their hull. Sometimes they ping back. Sometimes it’s just a whale. In fourteen years of serving in this capacity, I have pinged with another submarine spouse four times total.
Long tours of duty away from our spouses can bring on a kind of insanity called Partner of a Traveler Solitary Dementia or PTSD. We are left in our in our boats receiving cryptic and inconsistent messages from our Command. We begin to hyper analyze those words, to see sinister messages encoded in the casual conversation. Sometimes I can barely hear my husband over the noise of a plane or the distance to and from a satellite circling the other side of the globe. He doesn’t say what I think he should or he doesn’t ask the right question. I lie awake, then, wondering why he couldn’t just feel what I needed over the internet connection. The answer must be a problem with him, of course. You see, we begin to drive ourselves crazy. This paranoia is a common and deadly side-effect of long tours of duty as a Submarine Spouse. We read too much into things, we tell ourselves stories about what our spouses are thinking or feeling and we weave a fantasy that we live in, without release, for days or weeks at a time. These stories, like any story you hear enough, begin to seem true and like part of the fabric of the marriage. And a good Submarine Housewife can write one so elaborate and surreal that the traveler can return and be acting out a part in the story and never even know what he’s doing wrong. Beware PTSD, it’s the Silent Killer of the deep.
Forces on the hull also push is closer to the brink. On our daily duty, we encounter a thousand harassments and conflicts. We face these challenges with steadfast confidence in the face of the crew, but in our hearts, we are wishing that we could consult Command or possibly have him sweep in and do the dirty work. You get up early to finish the Math assignment we struggled with the night before. Where is the person who makes coffee for me? Resentment begins to build. Why should I take the call from the Principal about one while trying to wash the acrylic paint of the clothes of another and checking the fever of the third. More resentment builds, testing the ship’s integrity. Little pops and leaks occur. At this depth, you have to fix those fast or it could mean the end of it all.
Now, at some point in every cruise, I begin to get used to being Captain. I decide the living room does not need to be swept. I decide the dinner dishes can wait for the post-breakfast wash. I sleep in the middle of the bed and leave my toiletries on the counter. I wear my glasses every day, my hair in a ponytail and my raggedy jeans are my uniform. And then the orders come to surface. The traveler is returning and we’ll need to be ship-shape to pick him up when his capsule drops in the drink. This period is called Battle Stations. Imagine those movie scenes where a claxon sounds and men run franticly hither and fro. That’s me. It means I drive around madly and pick up all the dry cleaning that’s been sitting there for weeks, get the shoes from the shoe repair and dig the ESPN magazines out of the recycling. Oh and wash the laundry I’ve left molding in his hamper for the duration of his trip. For a long time I thought I was the only Submarine Spouse who did this but one day, waiting in a long line at the Dry Cleaner, the Submariner behind me, whose husband was a movie producer gone for months at a time, leaned forward and said, “Don’t sweat it, all the flights are delayed at O’Hare, we’ve all got plenty of time.” There was an audible sigh from the women in line. Clearly this is a drill we all do.
Let’s stop for a moment and consider what the traveler is going through. He is best compared to an Astronaut, I think. His travel is so impossibly far and his experiences so impossibly different from the Submariner that they cannot possibly be taking place on the same planet. So he has taken off in a stuffy and overcrowded and increasingly dangerous ship. He has left the very atmosphere he shared with his family and gone out to explore strange new planets and worlds of which we cannot comprehend. Many of them have hostile atmospheres and he goes only from his hotel to the meeting and back. He can say he’s been to Jupiter, but he didn’t see any of it. The rare exception to this rule is almost worse, when he does get a chance to enjoy it and the Submarine Housewife resents it. There was a famous time when I was snowed into a Chicago blizzard with a broken foot and three snow-day-bored kids when my husband called to tell me he had just had a lovely three mile run through historic Brussels. But I digress. Our Astronaut has had a long a tiresome trip, he worked more hours than were reasonable, he wore the same clothes for way too many days and he ate food he didn’t like. Then he flew home and was subjected to the volatile forces of entering the atmosphere: heat, pressure and then a drop in the drink at the end. This is the beginning of the very ugly reality that we Submarine Spouses call: Re-Entry.
We pick him up in our lovely submarine and welcome him with open arms. As long as there are goodies, if he forgot to stop at the space station and get goodies, the kids won’t have open arms at all, believe me. We make his quarters as welcoming as we can. We let him rest and “de-pressurize.” We make sure he gets good food and rest and we impress him with our pressed uniforms and sharp salutes. He presumes he has returned to the same ship he left. He forgets that that was hundreds of revolutions ago, a thousand nights and fights and fits and fevers have come and gone in his absence. We’ve sloughed skin cells and lost teeth. I often think of my mother sitting across from my dad and pointing to the hair on the top of her head at the part, “This, this inch of hair was not here when you left!” No, it is not the same ship, not the same crew that he left behind. It is altered and he must take a while, make an effort, to get to know them again. He must ask them what they are reading and he must listen to the trivial things the happened while he was traveling at light speed. He must become familiar before becoming intimate.
Ultimately, we deliver him to dry land. He’ll go to the office for a few days and then prepare for another launch and another rough re-entry. This process takes place over and over again, dozens of times a year. The longer he is away, the tougher the re-entry, the tougher the re-entry the longer he needs to spend with us to recover before his next flight. And the Submarine must recover as well; it must check its leaks and burn off its barnacles. Re-entry and recovery are the hardest part of the tour. He’s exhausted and doesn’t come back to the planet he left. He doesn’t recognize the landscape and he doesn’t know how to navigate it like he should. She must ask herself if her archetype of Evil Emperor matches this humble traveler before her. She must forget and forgive. And she must ask herself as well, now that you’ve seen what his idea of “picked up” means, do you really want to resent his lack of help, or be grateful he’s not around to do more of that?
It is hard indeed, during the years of service, for the Submarine Housewife and the Traveler. Both people put a tremendous amount of love into their work every day. It would serve them both to remember to put that much work into their love. But while this picture of a marriage constantly strained by travel is a dismal one, thousands of loving people survive it – my parents did. Because beyond the image of the Astronaut and Submarine, is the image of the Earth. In our analogy the Earth is the reason we do it, the reason we go through years of struggle together and apart. The Earth is how much we love each other: bigger than both of us, powerful enough to contain us and magnificent enough to be worth the work. So while, he’s an astronaut and I’m just a sub-driver, at the end of our heroic tour of duty, we both get a Parade.
