Crazy Little Thing Called Love

Emotions are draining.
I'm wondering if there's a prescription to numb feelings. Or maybe lobotomies are still available?

It's 6 am and I just waved my oldest off into the frosty darkness for his travel back to the U.S.
I'm teetering between sobbing on my keyboard or cooking breakfast for the other kids before they return to school today at the end of their Christmas holiday.

There's a Risk board set up on our dining table that sits there as a reminder of things that weren't and I'm not ready to dismantle it. I'm not ready to look at the territory cards my son held in his hand (with gleeful thoughts of destroying our armies) for fear I might discover this could have been his year to win (a good thing since I usually slaughter everyone with dumb luck). It's tradition in our house to play Lord of the Rings Risk for New Year's Eve, but this year, we were moving on the 2nd and so even though the game remain unpacked, the table wasn't available.

J1 hovered around, very unhelpfully, questioning when the game would begin and I explained that the minute we got into the new place it would go up. It didn't. It did go up Sunday, but he was in rare form with his insults and impatience and when I tried explaining to him that he was going to need to learn to have more tolerance for other people, he started spouting off how we criticise him all of the time and he's tired of it. I was finished with him and the game.

And so it sat.

All day yesterday.
When my Husband got up and left the house early Monday morning on our last day together as a family, it set me off. He returned with tools to drill holes in walls and caulk for tubs and windows... and proceeded to work despite my protests.

The game taunted me from the dining area.

I could also hear in my head, my son (on Friday night), "I haven't really had any time with Dad-- what's going on on Monday?"

By 3.30 I had a washer and dryer hooked up, but I never wanted to see my husband again. His deployment couldn't begin quickly enough. I watched the clock like a woman on death row and despaired as the only sunshine we had (for the 2 1/2 weeks while J1 was here) slowly faded into dusk.
In all fairness to the Hubby, there was all of the time before that last day that a very reclusive man-child wasted. His appearance rarely happened before 11 so he never had breakfast with us. He complained of boredom while we packed and even while there were people hauling things into our house for us. He chose not to attend church with us ("no one ever woke me up"), not even for the Christmas Carol service. He was completely self-absorbed and pining for his girlfriend. I wanted to get a family shot of us outside of a castle or other English heritage site, but he said "I'm not interested in buildings". He had in his mind the things he wanted to do and most of them didn't include his siblings.

There was laughter. There were good times, but not as many as there should have been for that length of time.

So you can imagine the state of my emotions as I stood in the darkness with icy crunching under my feet and watched the car tail lights fade from view. The regrets of things that never were. The photos we never took, the fun we never had, the game we never played. Wasted sunshine. Wasted moments.

I want to crawl back into my bed and pull the covers up, but there's four little faces that are going to come downstairs in a moment. Faces that will be excited to begin school again to see their friends. Faces that will bravely try not to cry that their brother is gone again.
Love stinks.

I'll take that lobotomy now.