Business travel flew onto my radar more than fifteen years ago, catching me completely unaware of what it meant to my marriage. My husband entered a new position in his company that promoted the practice of meeting customers on their home turf to better meet their needs, to promote business relations and, of course, to increase sales.
This meant he spent less time on our home turf. The travel held an adventurous appeal with new cities, new people, new restaurants, and new experiences. My husband brought back postcards, pictures and souvenirs from his jaunts to various locations. I held down the fort and traveled to and from my school every day, learning to navigate expanses of life alone.
Our daughter came into the world and the travel continued. With my husband on the road or in the air a few days of each week, or home one week, away the next, I developed an Auto Pilot that I switched on as needed, letting me coordinate our daughter's care, housekeeping, and whatever needed doing without assistance from anyone else. I didn't stop to think or to feel separated from my husband because "busy" kept me going. Never a dull moment, never any down time. Once I hit the pillow, exhaustion eliminated thinking about missing the man I married many nights.
Even with a full schedule, I did feel a bitter loneliness that I refused to recognize for years. From the beginning, I learned to take the solitude in stride, using the time as my own at-home vacation. I initiated home improvement projects and worked to surprise him on his return from whatever destination held him outside my reach that week. In our 75-year old house, the list of projects never ended, taking most of my attention and a good portion of my time. I watched whatever I wanted on television and cooked foods I liked. I had never lived on my own prior to marriage, and here I was, doing it after marriage. How odd.
Enter into the mix our son and our family's move to my hometown. Same job, same travel but different routes. The new surroundings and new home projects kept me going from morning to night, and growing children required more time and energy on top of it. I was tired of everything never stopping, doing so much by myself. This schedule kept my husband exhausted most of the time, too, feeling he had little time for himself or for getting anything done aside from work. Double whammy.
Marriage wasn't supposed to feel this way. Ours did. I had no words to describe it and I never said a word to my husband about it. I never once shared my feelings, because I feared causing him more stress. I had stopped telling him I missed him due to that same fear, thinking that if I let the cat out of the bag I would lose my ability to keep up the façade I had constructed for the public to see, masking what lay underneath. I had no idea that sharing my feelings would have given us a new level of intimacy and could have drawn us closer. I had no clue that I could have alleviated some of the loneliness just by admitting I felt it. I did not understand that telling my husband I missed him -- every time -- would bring out his protective side, rather than what I saw most of the time, which looked a lot like indifference. Why take charge when someone else so willingly takes the controls? You get used to flying solo as a business traveler's wife.
For more of those fifteen years than I like to admit, I did not walk closely with God. I took our children to church, helped them say bedtime prayers, said a blessing at mealtimes, and prayed my own prayers on occasion. I owned a Bible. I helped at Vacation Bible School each summer and joined church committees. Yet, mostly, I filled a pew. I filled it at a slightly higher level than most people. I held positions in church, after all. So did the Pharisees, for whom Jesus listed a whole lot of woes (Luke 11: 37-54) as they perched in their lofty positions, completely bereft of actual faith.
I had no idea how to pray. I did what I thought covered the bases. Lots of requests, a few praises, no confessions. Spilling my lonely heart's contents to God would have changed things, which I learned in larger struggles later on, but I did not feel the draw. I had committed too much to Auto Pilot and the plane was going down.
Looking back over these years -- the majority of our married life -- I see the patterns and the struggles and the inability to face my own fears and to address the problem because I felt too uncomfortable to name it. This inability to state the fear or to name the trouble reminds me of the first few "Harry Potter" books (JK Rowling), throughout which everyone fears to utter the name of the enemy, Voldemort. Finally, Harry has the foresight to realize that naming the evil makes it less overwhelming, gives it a handle that allows a person to take hold and face it ... and with help, learn to conquer it.
God would have provided that conquering power to me. Had I prayed it out, the way I do now, I would have felt that amazing uplift of God's Spirit ... like an airplane rising off the runway. I would have felt His guidance systems holding me at a level place, and even when turbulence and storms hit, I would have felt his might and power, holding it all together better than the fuselage of a plane protecting my traveling husband. He would have given me the power to name Satan as my accuser, my tempter, my constructer of facades and my fear, and provided all the conquering I needed.
Loneliness hurts, and when I felt lonely, others could not recognize it, even my husband. Loneliness showed up looking like pride, getting in the way of uttering the words, "I feel alone," or, "I don't want to do this by myself." It succeeded in letting self-preservation prevail rather than letting out the secret that handling life without a mate on board made me long for something I couldn't have. I longed for him to be home (still do!), couldn't wait for him to walk through the doorway (still can't), and then wouldn't know how to express those feelings once he did arrive home, because the floodgates opened and let out every emotion I kept to myself for too long. No more!
God and I have worked on this, and I know that He was there all the time, back when I didn't bother to ask for help. He kept me going through all the tasks I set for myself, and held me up behind facades that protected me from others knowing my secret struggle. He knew my heart, and carried me through the days and nights when my husband couldn't be near.
Still today, He knows I feel lonely without the blue-eyed gentleman I love so dearly. I can't not miss the man!
"Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate." ~~Mark 10:9
The difference these days lies in the sharing of truth. I miss my husband while he travels and I tell him so. He misses me, our children and the comfort of home and he sends me messages as often as he can, sharing his excursions, some of the interesting points of his work, and sending photos of himself in various locations throughout his trip. For these connections, I fully appreciate technology!
I also fully appreciate God letting me in on a fact: my husband has more to miss than I do. Talk about an epiphany! My inward focus allowed me see and feel my own loneliness, and to not take into account my husband feeling the same way. Or feeling worse.
I know that God didn't create me to be a business traveler.
God created me to be right here, taking care of things while my husband takes on the business world in cities around the country and sometimes across the world. God created me to manage the home front, to be right here waiting, making home "home" for a man who misses out on its comfort far too often. He provided a way for my husband to provide for me and our children, and to use his travel knowledge to take us to new places once in a while, and to use his abilities at catching flights on time, finding his way in unknown places, and demonstrating impeccable hotel etiquette for his family to respect and learn from when we go out into the world in our smaller ways.
I will never not miss my husband when he travels. I will feel lonely and solitary at times, even in a crowd. Having God guide me, holding me steady over bumps I cannot see and through experiences I haven't gone through before on my own, gives me interesting perspective. It helps the loneliness have purpose, because from it, I appreciate my husband's presence even more. Loneliness teaches me that God is my comfort, and that one day, in his Ultimate Care, loneliness will not show up on my radar ever again.
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