I’ll be at a conference this week on the east coast. This isn’t too bad, except for the distance that I must travel to get to the conference.
While I love being in El Paso—there is nothing close to El Paso. It is a four hour drive to Albuquerque, NM. Growing up in upstate South Carolina, it was four hours to the far away city of Charleston! Here, Albuquerque is the closest large city (besides Las Cruses).
So, the trip to go anywhere takes multiple days in the car or a flight. This distance was made clear when my son said as they dropped me off at the airport:, “I don’t want to join the Army because I would have to get in an airplane and fly across the county.”
It’s interesting to me to revisit how hard it is to be separated from the family. In the Army, over the last fifteen years, there’s been multiple deployments and separations. I have deployed twice and have gone away to training, but it never gets easier. I expect that it will be hard and I know how to think it through. However, my kids are at different ages.
My oldest girls were three or four during my last deployment. My son, Will, turned two on the day I returned home from that same deployment. Jenny has never had a day where I was deployed. For her entire life, the longest I have been a way is about two weeks—if that much. But leaving doesn’t get easier.
As I write this at about 30,000 feet, I find comfort in the fact that I will not be gone long. And I’ll be back with my kids playing Mario Smash Bros. at the end of the week.