Ryan and Christy's Place

To our one remaining reader ...

ryanseals — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 17:28:00 GMT

It's been so long, I almost forgot how to post! Does anyone still read this?

I feel as if some sort of "closure" is in order. We are obviously not posting as much as we used to -- and I hate to just leave our blog out there in cyberspace, dangling around with our last entry being about getting our dog. (Not that we don't love our dog.)

We're together now. Life's better. And I'd blog more, but entries about dirty dishes are hardly as compelling as entries on oh, IEDs, being away from home or thinking about stealing strawberry jam from the grocery store in a fit of rage. We've dealt with post-deployment issues -- everyone does -- but since we have each other to talk to every day, live and in person, the result is naturally less blogging.

I'd like to resume more eventually. I'd like to keep the blog -- I hope it doesn't ever disappear on me. (And Steve wouldn't do that ... right? Haha.) I read old entries from time to time, and they still make me cry. Maybe someone doing a Google search will find this site and read it, and maybe it will help them, even though my time in a deployment is over. That's still my hope. That's what this whole thing was for. To help me, to help Ryan, to help others, to meet others. It's a big world, but it's small, too.

Love you guys. We'll still be around. :)

-- Christy

P.S. Go wish Erika a happy wedding!

Long time, no nothin'

ryanseals — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 05:38:00 GMT

I'll begin by saying that MATT IS HOME! And Erika has a new, awesomely titled blog: Just 'Cause We've Made It This Far Doesn't Mean We've Made It."

She writes that she wants to start fresh, and I kind of admit I am feeling that myself. Maybe it's the start of spring, my wedding anniversary coming up -- so many things. I haven't really updated because honestly, a lot's been going on.

I like the title of Erika's blog because it conveys to me the fact that when it's over, it's not OVER. A deployment, I've found out, seeps its way into every bit of your life long after the welcome home ceremony and the uniform is cleaned and hanging in the closet, patiently waiting for the next drill weekend. It's in every sad feeling, every happy one, every up and down.

The common thought for many people, I think, is that when the soldier is home, all is well and easy again, when the truth is we still have to work hard for our relationship. Sure, the initial "honeymoon" phase is great, but real life comes, too. That's not to say real life isn't great -- to me, just having Ryan home for the ups and downs is a triumph in itself. But we're growing as a married couple, and much of what we are now is tied to what we went through then.

So I'm not sure what this post is ... a hello, a "we're still here" and a common cry maybe to people dealing with post-deployments -- and the happy, sad and sometimes bad moments that follow. Sometimes I wonder if I even want to chronicle "post-deployment" life. Some parts of it seem mundane, but some seem intensely personal to us. Which is funny, considering how personal some of my other posts got.

Bottom line is, we're happy. We've learned that our love and committment to each other is far stronger than anything that may come our way.

I guess I'm saying, to people out there and to myself: Don't be scared when it's hard. There will always be hard times. Just remember what you went through, and that you did the thing you thought you couldn't do.

--Christy

Welcome home, Matt!

ryanseals — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 18:17:00 GMT

Erika's soldier is home. I can't begin tell you guys what a great person and friend she is. She promises a reunion post and pictures soon! But I'm sure nobody will be mad if she "disappears" for a while to be with Matt!

The homecoming is featured in the Las Vegas Sun -- and she's quoted! Read the whole thing to find it. :)

Yay, Erika!

ryanseals — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 02:20:00 GMT

Matt's almost home.

Hip, hip, hooray!

ryanseals — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 17:57:00 GMT

CaliValleyGirl's soldier is back!!! Check it out:

To say I was nervous is an understatement.

So true

ryanseals — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 07:09:00 GMT

I had to put another update, since I just read CaliValleyGirl's post about "The Graduating Class of OEF VI and OIF3."

This post is a must-read. It is absolutely right on about the mixed feelings you have at the end of a deployment. There's joy, obviously, that Ryan is home. But also, there's this, at the end of things, as Britt wrote:

"... I will miss my fellow bloggers and non-blogging interne-t friends who have accompanied me on this journey, either by me passively reading their blogs, or actually communicating with them. It's weird to spend almost everyday with someone, and be a part of their life, and then * poof *, they're gone. ...

"The flip side of the redeploying coin, is that once the soldiers come home and we have our lives back, we lose the connection we once had with many people. We were all thrown together into this deployment experience and have accompanied each other, but like with graduation, and the signing of yearbooks, and promises to keep in touch, the reality is that without the cement of the deployment, we will no longer really be a part of each other's lives."

It's a sad thing, really, to not talk as much anymore, circumstances of why we talked aside. Man, how I love those girls. My girls. My battle buddies.

-- Christy

Long time coming

ryanseals — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 20:09:00 GMT

You'll never believe why Ryan and I haven't posted! It's an amazing tale! Full of mystery and adventure! We can hardly believe it!

Um ... haha. Actually it has more to do with just living a normal life again than with adventure. But after the past two years, I can't imagine anything better than "normal."

Basically, we've just been enjoying time together -- I've been working, and Ryan's been job hunting and freelancing sports stories. When we're not working we just relax, go to the park, watch TV and lament the fact that we only get one hour of "24" a week. (Darn being spoiled by seasons 1 through 4 on DVD!) We're thinking about getting a dog. We REALLY need to clean out our car. Just normal stuff, and it's great!

What's also great is that lots of OTHER friends of mine are on their way to getting their soldiers home -- Erika and Britt of CaliValleyGirl. And Britt of the former site A Soldier's Girl already has welcomed home her husband, Wes. All the amazingly STRONG women I've leaned on and who have helped me be strong are about to get what they've waited for too long, too! Their soldiers. And a new start together! And probably more of my friends are getting closer to the end, too. It's like "graduation" day or something. We're at the end of it all, and a new cycle of families is beginning it. I feel for them ... it's not a fun place to be. But at least we're DONE.

I won't say it's always easy, settling back into the "normal" life. There are hardships, getting to know each other again/better, learning to deal with what's happened. But the truth is that it's all a blessing, and we're so happy.

We'll update more soon!

-- Christy (and Ryan!)

We're MIA ... no wait, we're just lazy

ryanseals — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 03:34:00 GMT

Long, long ago I promised Ryan and I would keep updating. Long, long ago I promised pictures of the soldiers guarding our Christmas tree. Long, long ago, I was a liar.

I'm sorry the posts lately have been so few and far between. The truth is, Ryan and I haven't forgot about our blog (though most people who read it probably have!), we're just basking in the ability to do one thing -- BE together. We wake up. We eat cereal. We watch "24" (addicted!). We do laundry. We take walks in the park, do Christmas things, and enjoy what we've missed doing for so long. But we hate to see our blog neglected ... so I promise that SOON those soldier pictures will be posted. Because dang, they're funny.

-- Christy

Poking right along

ryanseals — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 23:13:00 GMT

Well, it has almost a been a month back at home now for me, and I seem to be settling in quite nicely. The transition from being a full-time soldier to a full-time husband hasn't been the easiest one, but I am making progress. The biggest problem? Feeling that I'm not pulling my fair share by sitting around not working. Mostly that has come from me being on the go day in and day out for as long as I can remember, even before the deployment. Before I left I was just finishing up my bachelor's degree, and then I went straight into training. Now, having this down time between coming off active duty and finding a job, is just hard adjust to. The good news, though, is that I hopefully will be working soon, as I am following up on a few job leads and landed my first interview for next week. I still plan on keeping a low profile until the first of the year to enjoy Christmas and New Year's.

Christy has been very supportive of me taking this time off to recover from being gone. She kind of gets aggravated at me whenever I start talking about not pulling my fair share and says I deserve it. Her view is that I worked for 500-plus days in a row, and the days I did have off in that period, I was still at work anyway. She compared that to spending her days off from the paper in the break room, and tells me I should chill out already.

I guess all of this is part of the readjustment process. It's great to be back, and I'm excited about going back to work soon. I have a lot of good things to look forward to.

- Ryan

Also, the News & Record of Greesboro, N.C. recently did a piece about this site that ran in the Life section Nov. 27. Click here to check it out.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! (and homecoming pics)

ryanseals — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 19:17:00 GMT

Somebody's 24 today.

Happy birthday, Ryan! Glad this year's better than the last.

-- Christy

UPDATE: To celebrate this joyous day, I've posted pictures of ANOTHER joyous day -- Ryan's homecoming! (Christmas soldier pictures to come, I promise.) SO: Enjoy these shots!

Thanksgiving, in the highest sense

ryanseals — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 03:23:00 GMT

I've taken to fits of inexplicable crying.

I'm not sure where this comes from. I'm not sad. I'm actually shocked I'm not dried up. Apparently there's a drought in the part of North Carolina where I live, and I'm convinced I could fix it, if only they'd let me cry into the lakes around here. But unlike tears during the deployment -- tears of fear, uncertainty, loneliness, etc. -- I think these tears are relief, and something else.

For instance, on the way home from Thanksgiving in Tennessee this week, I heard the new Kenny Chesney song "Who You'd Be Today" on the radio and started sobbing. It made me think of a woman I "know" (through reading her blog) whose husband died in Iraq. The song just cut through me because I thought of her and wondered how her Thanksgiving was, and if her little boy was OK, and I was holding Ryan's hand, and I remembered last year eating Thanksgiving dinner at my tiny apartment with my mom, sitting on the floor with the food spread over my coffee table, not being able to eat it because we were sad.

Listening to that song, and just in general, I've felt relief and happines that Ryan was home, and this overwhelming joy and feeling of thanks. How can you thank God enough for bringing someone you love more than anything home to you? How do you tell the people who prayed for him, and cared for you and him, what it meant to you? I have this huge ball of emotion in me, this thanks and joy that I don't even know how to express. Every night I read my Bible, the same Psalm (Psalms 91), over and over, so much that the page was crumpled and worn. I prayed to be strong, to get him home, to keep him safe, and now he is. How do I give thanks enough? I never knew the power of prayer, the true power it can have. Now I think I know a slice of the infinite power of God and His love.

Then I think of people who didn't get the chance I have. I can't answer the question of why they didn't and I did get my loved one back; nobody can. I just don't know. That also makes me cry. To know that life is so delicate, and we never really know the outcome, but here Ryan and I are, blessed with this chance at life together, one that we'll cherish more than ever because now, I think, we realize the price that can be paid.

It's an amazing tangle of emotions, the end of something like this. I guess it will continue to be. This whole holiday season, this whole year, my whole life, I'll be giving thanks for the gift I got: my husband.

And now, since this post made me cry and I want to end on a funny note: Coming Soon: Pictures of the soldiers who are serving and protecting our Christmas tree.

-- Christy

Sand and skin

ryanseals — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 08:18:00 GMT

A few days ago, Ryan said, "My heart is in the United States, but I still feel as if my mind wants to wander back to Iraq." It's something that resonated with Army Advice blogger James Mahurin. And it resonated with me, too.

You just can't turn off your attachment to a place; your feelings about a place that was in your thoughts every hour, every second of every day for nearly 18 months. Soldiers' attachments are different than my own, but I still feel it. ... I still feel something. My heart feels a sharp tug. There are still so many people there. It seems like they'll be there forever.

When I see a man or woman in a military uniform, I want to reach out to them, to touch them or hug them. Tell them I care. When I see Iraq in the news, I still stop to read or watch. My heart still races at the news of deaths. I think about Iraq, and how I know Ryan's mind still goes there, too. To sandy hills and a bright blue sky. That sand gets on your hands and sticks; I found this out when he mailed items home. It's not like the beach sand we know. It's different; it's fine, and I could barely see it until it was all over me.

I think Ryan and I might always have a little sand on our hands. We might always walk with our faces turned slightly east, over the Atlantic. Thinking about how that ocean separated us for so long, how we changed as it churned, how that war-torn country seeped into our skin.

-- Christy

Split-second decisions

ryanseals — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 18:32:00 GMT

In the headlines from Iraq this morning, along with the huge question of whether or not Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a raid in Mosul, is news of American soldiers killing four Iraqis, including one child, outside of a base in Baquba.

For the full story click HERE

According to reports, soldiers on patrol, mostly likely the base's Quick Reaction Force fired on upon the vehicle after the driver ignored repeated warnings to stop the vehicle. The incident was highly suspicious based on a recent car bomb on the same road, which runs between the cities of Baquba and Khalis.

This could prove to be another black eye in the American efforts to create peace in Iraq, but hopefully it won't be portrayed very negatively in the media. I can already hear the Sunday morning news shows criticizing the soldiers for the loss of innocent life, but honestly unless you've been there in those soldiers’ boots, the talk show hosts have no room to talk, nor does anybody else.

Based on what I've read about the story, it appears that those soldiers did the right thing by firing on the car, especially with the vehicle's reported proximity to a U.S. base. FOX News is reporting the incident as the soldiers mistakenly firing on the vehicle is most likely incorrect. In hindsight, with the vehicle coming up clean and the loss of four Iraqi lives, including the loss of a child is regrettable, it wasn't a mistake.

What people fail to understand when a situation like this takes place is the high stress level these soldiers are under and the split-second decisions that they have to make.

Take for instance my former base in Iraq, where I usually served guard duty three times a week at the front gate. At that gate, we had warning signs at about 200 meters away along the road entering the base. The signs, written in both Arabic and English, told visitors that any private vehicle that fails to stop at that sign and wait for further instructions from the guards at the gate were subject to be engaged by deadly force. If a vehicle came pass that point, there was no way for us to know what might have been inside. We weren't worried about the loss of a citizen's life; we were more concerned about protecting ourselves and the other men on that base from the threat of a vehicle-born improvised explosive device.

What all this boils down to is that once you are in a high combat zone such as Iraq you have one mission that stands out above them all, to protect the men that you serve with. This goal becomes even more important when there are threats in proximity of a U.S. base.

There is an investigation that will be prompted by the military on this incident, and who knows what it will find. But if things happened the way it appears in the news, these soldiers won't face any kind of penalty. They were doing their job, which includes making split-second decisions, but unfortunately sometimes those decisions are the wrong ones.

- Ryan

Living without the "X-Factor"

ryanseals — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 14:52:00 GMT

It has almost been a week. A week ago this afternoon I finally got home and reunited with my family after the longest year in my life.

It really hasn't hit me yet. I'm in a new city. I'm in a new apartment. I have a new car. Soon, I'll be looking for a new job. Heck, I even have a new wife.

It has just been hard to imagine not having to live life at home with "X" amount of days left. The last three times that I was home for any amount of time, I was living with the "X-Factor."

No longer do I have to cram everything I want to do into just a few days. No longer do I have to juggle my schedule to make sure I see this person and that person. No longer do I have to make sure I get this and that done by this certain day.

In the big scheme of things, I no longer am confined to the schedule of war. I am free to go as a please, sleep whenever I want, and eat food that doesn't taste like it's been scraped off the floor. No longer do I have to wonder when the next time will be that I'll be called outside of the wire to help pick up Muhammed whatshisname or wonder when the next time will be that any of my buddies or I will run past an IED.

It all seems almost surreal actually. I can definitely relate to how Christy feels when she keeps asking whether or not I am real.

My heart is in the United States, but I still feel as if my mind wants to wander back to Iraq.

But it will all just take time though, in a life not living with the "X-Factor."

- Ryan

The sweetest reunion

ryanseals — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 21:53:00 GMT

I can't stop touching his face. Or pressing my face into the nape of his neck, where the smell of his shampoo mixes with aftershave or cologne or whatever he uses that makes his smell his.

Last night I had a dream that he was only on leave; that he had to go back in a month. I woke up, groggy from sleep and twisted around in the bed to face him. What's going on? Does he have to go back? It took a minute, but my head cleared.

No. He's home.

Last Friday, he came back. I stood with hundreds of soldiers' family and friends at his National Guard armory in Tennessee, waiting on a bus that carried Ryan and about 50 other soldiers. We waited. We clutched flags and signs. Children ran around, yellow balloons bobbing above their heads, writing messages in sidewalk chalk on the pavement.

Cell phones rang sporadically. It was soldiers on the bus, phoning their loved ones to give them a play-by-play of where they were. Voices rang out across the lawn. "They've hit the county line!" "They're on Interstate 81!" "They're on Main Street!" Each shout brought another chill of excitement, a roar of screaming and cheering.

And then, we heard them. We heard sirens, because at least 10 Highway Patrol cars and local police cars led them. We heard motorcycles, because hundreds of members of a veterans association led the bus on their bikes. The cop cars drove up the hill to the armory; then the motorcycles came. Then, we saw them. A bus, all lit up from the inside, a sea of men in camo standing up, waving their hats, home. People started crying. I was one of them.

I saw him on the bus as it passed me in the crowd. He didn't see me, but I saw his face. Looking out, expectant. The sweet face of a man coming home to his family, at last, looking and hoping to catch a glimpse of them.

When the bus parked, I ran to it. I pushed past men, women, children. When I reached the bus door, he was stepping off. He turned and saw me, and his face lit up.

The rest is almost a blur. Hugging, kissing, laughing, crying. Reunions are such sweet things, especially after a deployment. Families reuniting, soldiers laughing and chatting with each other, telling inside jokes.

I couldn't stop touching his face. He laughed at me that night, because I kept asking him, "Are you real?"

"Yes, honey," he'd say. "I'm real."

I feel real again, too.

-- Christy