Ok, over the nine month hump and now rapidly approaching the 1/2 mark in my contract. You can read about and prepare yourself for working in conditions such as Afghanistan and like places. You can overcome homesickness, missing friends and family, and in my case in particular, missing your motorcycle and the life thereof. That is all mental. The one thing that is very physical is the click, click, click of life's clock. Not getting older or anything, have you but life and the things that come along in life continue to move on despite being thousands of miles away from home. It is not like you can hop on a quick plane trip. I am in fact isolated from that world and am forced to look upon it from afar. The news from the U.S. is one thing. A new President trying to find his way, the economic struggles, the every day ups and downs of the daily news. What is hard to deal with is one's personal life continues to move on and each time the opportunity arises to come home it is like a whole new world.
9 months in and thus far my eldest daughter and her husband are expecting a daughter to be delivered in October. Big news, yes I feel old, but the hardest part is I am not there. My son has been diagnosed with ADHD. Common among children today, yes, but I am not there. My youngest daughter is struggling with coming into adulthood, where life will lead her, not to mention struggling with the fact that she lives in small town, Hicksville, USA. Now, these things would happen regardless. In the U.S., though, at least I would be a phone call away and I could at least hear properly. Now I have to communicate via email, deal with the time delays, and have to try to figure out the words instead of "hearing." We all know how that can be and how tough it is to read everything that needs to be read into an email but not to read too much. Not to mention the impersonal nature of such communication.
It is not as if I ever thought the world revolved around me but it is hard to prepare yourself for your own world to continue to evolve. It is eye opening, in fact, because of the stark realization that it will happen regardless of whether you are there or not and that you are forced to deal with it via email.
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