We Were About To Become Empty Nesters. Then My Husband Made A Shocking Decision That Changed Everything.

We lie in bed tangled up in the sheets on a Monday night, savoring the little time we have left before my husband will leave for a month. There are piles of military uniforms folded neatly and stacked high on the dresser. His camouflage bags are scattered on the floor.

My husband’s decision to join the Army — at age 55, no less — is no longer an abstraction that will come to pass sometime in the distant future. He leaves in six days.

We have been married for 24 years, and this is the longest we will have ever been apart. At this moment, I really do not want to let him go. I want to forget the whole thing and get back to our normal life — the one where we have launched three of our four kids off to college, with only our youngest, age 17, still at home.

He’s our baby boy, but that baby boy is incredibly independent now. In fact, tonight he has driven himself to hockey practice, which is why we have the luxury of lying in bed among the clothes we carelessly tossed off a little while ago.

I want this experience for my husband. I know he has longed to give back to this country, which truly became a land of opportunity for his family when his parents immigrated here nearly 60 years ago. When he was 9 years old, he wrote a letter to then President-elect Jimmy Carter stating, “Even though my skin is brown and I wear glasses, I hope to become president someday.”

The letter resulted in an invitation to President Carter’s inauguration, which his mother proudly took him to on a cold January afternoon in 1977. His desire to serve, born out of gratitude for a life filled with possibilities that his own parents had not had, existed long before we ever met. I want this for him. I am just not so sure I want this for me — or for us.

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