My husband comes home today. Outside I feel all demure and proud of the way KittyCat has grown since he's been away. It hasn't even been that long, really. Two and a half weeks. One pay period. Half a month. And yet it still seems like a longer time than that.

Last night I went shopping with a friend and we bought special homecoming presents for our husbands. She has a pretty new outfit. I bought something slinky and pretty- one piece that I can wear often in regular life and one piece that I'll save just for him in intimate moments. The sun hasn't come out to burn off the fog here yet; I wish it would. In a way it's like how I've felt these past weeks. Without his presence here, my world is foggy and gray and just a little overcast. When I go to the pier to bring him home this afternoon, the sun will come out and I'm going to stretch my arms to the sky to try and hold the warmth just that little bit closer. Over the past couple of years, I've learned that this is the way a lot of navy wives feel. I'll expand that to encompass all military wives, though I can only speak for navy... we don't wither away and die without their presence in our homes, because we never really let them go. Our Husbands (and Wives) are still here; in our memories, in the ghosts that roam the house in the middle of the afternoon when the babies are napping and we remember how it felt to have our Loves holding us. Once I related it to a giant Him-shaped hole in my life. If we had broken up, it would have been a simpler matter of filling it with something or someone else. Since we hadn't broken up, and since we still loved each other LOTS, I had to hold that place ready for him to step back into when he returned.

Emotions are tricky things. When people ask me what I'm going to do during the next Long Deployment, now that I've got a baby, I tell them the truth. "I'm going to love him, and keep his house, and raise our child." That's really not that far off from what most women do.