This is what we’d been waiting on—life on our terms. No one was left with all the parenting duties because the other one worked too far away, neither one of us was in a delicate medical state that would require emergency hospital trips, and our adapted home was making all the difference in safety and convenience in everyday life. After so many years of big events happening to us, we were finally in charge of what we did with our lives. But autonomy and control also have an ugly side effect—complacency. As we pushed through 2017, Paige and I both settled into being people we didn’t like.
I think every wounded veteran, and maybe even every person who’s ever experienced trauma, must inevitably come face-to-face with questioning their purpose on earth. While in recovery, every veteran has that moment of asking, Why am I here? Why did this happen to me? While at Walter Reed, I was able to answer those questions easily: I fought to recover for my guys who were still overseas. I felt like every milestone I achieved was able to lift up someone else.
But now it was just us—me and my three girls—and our biggest issue was just getting through day after day. Life was happening around me, and I felt like a spectator, not a participant. This same questioning I had at Walter Reed came to me like an epiphany, except I didn’t suddenly have the answers to cure a disease, write a great song, or know how to put a man on Mars. It was an epiphany of quick questions in succession.
The same questions—Why am I here? Why did this happen to me?—assaulted my thoughts, except now, we didn’t know the answer. Paige and I went to work and came home from work, without ever pausing to question what we were doing. While we were in a much better place emotionally with each other, it didn’t help us understand why we were so tired even after we got decent sleep, or why we felt the need to work on an off weekend or a vacation. We tried a million things to just feel better, but nothing was worth repeating. We had given up on taking care of our bodies, which led me to try sleep studies and new sockets for my legs, but nothing was helping. At the end of the day everything was so much harder for me than it was for anyone else. After a while it was all I could think about.
PAIGE
Life was going by us at a hundred miles an hour. I was frustrated about being frustrated, beating myself up over feeling like I had already defeated this once. I have always been the more attentive spouse when it comes to feeling like things are getting out of whack. I would try to talk to Josh about never eating dinner together, missing church a lot, and working when we didn’t necessarily have to. Josh spent a lot of time justifying what he was doing and saying that there was no way around it. Our jobs were stressing us out as if they were life or death. We both love Auburn and everything that the university and the athletics department have given us, but at the end of the day, no one was getting shot at by the Taliban. This was not life or death. There was all this pressure to get it done, but then I’d look back wondering if I’d accomplished anything at all.
We spent the better part of 2017 like this: I’d wake up already irritated about something (Payton didn’t sleep well, Josh snored all night, I hit snooze too many times… ), I would walk around the house grumbling and griping at my children and husband as I got everyone ready for school, and finally we would be out the door. By the time I got to work, I felt behind. As an operations person, 80 percent of what I do is time sensitive. I would look at my to-do list and feel completely overwhelmed and incapable of getting it done. I would get started on one thing only to suddenly realize it was time for practice or a meeting. Then I would rush to the next location, knowing I was getting more behind but relieved that I temporarily didn’t have to face my to-do list. I was excited about watching practice, but it only reminded me that it was not the haven that it used to be for me. I truly loved coaching—helping people get better at volleyball by way of overcoming obstacles and learning leadership in real time. In my operations role, I didn’t get to do that firsthand anymore, which led me to becoming bitter, jealous, and judgmental and wishing I was doing something else. After practice, I would return to my office and my disaster of a to-do list. I lost weight, sleep, and self-esteem from insurmountable anxiety. I constantly woke up in the middle of the night in a sweat, realizing I didn’t schedule something that was needed in the next forty-eight hours or less. I would wake up wondering, Where is the greener grass people talked about once they settled into a career, life, marriage, parenting?
Inevitably, Josh and I grew apart for different reasons than the last time. Last time, we didn’t like each other and daydreamed about a life where we didn’t have to deal with each other. This time we were desperate for each other but couldn’t find the
