Our lease was up. We had to move, which was just as well: my commute was stressing me out within two weeks of starting my job. After sitting on the Beltway for hours every day, I ended up pounding on my dashboard screaming, “This is why they don’t let us keep our weapons when we get back from Iraq, you assholes—I would fucking shoot you!” We wanted to be somewhere with a better commute, where we’d be closer to friends, and have more room for Brian’s daughter Sonja when she came to visit. Brian got one more move paid for by the Army now that he was retired.
After searching for a couple of weeks we found a single-family home in Arlington that seemed perfect. The rent was twice what we were paying for our apartment, but it was more than twice the space and seemed to meet all our needs. There was a nice yard, a deck and a patio, a finished basement—“a man cave,” Brian called it—a master bedroom for us, a bright pink bedroom for Sonja, and another room I could use as an office.
As we boxed up our possessions, I eyed my box of dishes on the kitchen floor. It seemed wrong to bring them to our new house. We were starting over, it wasn’t fair to bring them with me—to lug around a box full of doubt. Committing completely to this marriage, to our future, required me to let go of this weighty symbol that I could start over without my husband at any moment. “Let’s take these to the thrift store,” I said to Brian. “Is there anything else you want to get rid of?”
I lugged them upstairs and hauled them out of the car at the Goodwill store. The box felt heavier than it should. I couldn’t help but open it up to look at the dishes one more time. I adored them, the tiny speckling on the top, the rich brown on the bottom. Brian’s dishes made an awful screeching noise when you cut food on them, there was an awkward transition between glazes. And that was only a set of eight. This was a full set of twelve! I loved them so much. They were one of the few symbols I had that my parents had ever been happily married other than my own existence. It seemed so unfair to get rid of them just to prove that I was committed to my own husband. But it was the right thing to do. Brian was indifferent to so many things about what we owned, how things were decorated. He wanted his dishes. I wanted him.
Firmly, resolutely, I closed the box and handed it over. Fresh start. No turning back.
“LET’S GET A DOG,” Brian had said out of nowhere not long before getting his job. “I’ve read they can help calm people down. Maybe it would help me with my anxiety attacks. This group used to bring them into Walter Reed so patients could pet them. And we’d have to walk it—I wouldn’t be able to just sit around the house, there would be a reason to get out of bed even if I felt depressed.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “But . . . I don’t want to sound like a bitch, but . . . I can’t be the only one to take care of the dog. If we get a dog, you have to do half the work.”
“Of course,” he assured me. “No problem! This will be my dog.”
We found a woman online who had rescued three German shepherd dogs from a high-kill shelter in North Carolina and was fostering all of them until she could find homes for them. We went out to meet them and one came to me immediately, a calmer female who was a few years old. I liked her immediately.
Brian was drawn to another, younger female who seemed shy but full of energy.
“Which one should we get?” he asked.
“You choose,” I said, “Since this is going to be your dog, your comfort animal.”
He picked the younger one. She cowered between my legs in the car on our way back from the apartment as we discussed names. “Princess,” the name she’d come with, was out of the question. “What about Thisbe?” I suggested. “It’s from a Greek myth, the one Romeo and Juliet is based on. I love it.”
“No way,” Brian retorted.
We tossed around ideas. Finally I threw out, “How about Kelby? It means ‘my dog’ in Arabic, but Americans won’t know that—and it sounds pretty.”
He agreed. I scratched her ears. “Do you like that name? Kelby. Good girl.”
They say dogs are just like their owners. It seems fitting, then, that our dog went crazy.
It took Kelby time to adjust to her new situation. The day we’d brought her home, she’d been terrified to even walk down the stairs to our basement apartment. When we tried to encourage her to sit and cuddle with us, she’d lain on the doggy bed we’d gotten her instead, eyeing us suspiciously. The dog had gone into a crate when we were going to leave the old apartment willingly enough at first; she responded immediately to hand signals we gave accidentally, sitting promptly at the sign of a raised hand and lying down when it was lowered. “I wonder what kind of situation she came from,” Brian and I mused regularly.
She warmed up to us slowly. But once Kelby finally decided that she trusted us, she was all in—the poor animal loved us too much. She developed terrible separation anxiety. Left alone, Kelby began to destroy things. On walks, she was aggressive toward other dogs, seeming convinced that all other dogs posed a grave threat to my life. No amount of explanation or reassurance could convince her that I was perfectly capable of protecting myself from five-pound poodles.
We took her to doggy obedience training. It helped—a little. They urged us to crate-train her at home, but when we put her back in the crate, she shredded the dog bed we left in it. Then Kelby started gnawing on the wires of the crate until her gums bled.
We tried just shutting her in the basement instead. One day a stranger called me. “Hi, I have your dog here—your number is on her dog tags—I found her and she came right up to me, but I thought you might want her.” I immediately went to retrieve her, then called Brian at work. “Did Kelby get away from you?”
“No,” he answered. “Why do you ask?”
“Someone found her outside.”
Once we got home, I went to the basement. From what I could piece together from the wreckage, she had jumped up onto a counter in the mini-kitchen area, shattering Brian’s collection of shot glasses, trying to get at the garden window on that wall. When she couldn’t dislodge it, she had climbed a wall (no, I am not kidding) in another part of the basement and knocked out a window.
At a routine veterinary appointment, she tested positive for heartworm. “But they said she’d just gotten treated for it!” I protested. Either the treatment hadn’t worked, or they hadn’t been honest about it—but she needed hundreds of dollars of medical care and then a period of enforced inactivity.
“Well,” I said, “we committed to caring for her.”
One day not long after she had recovered, Brian called me at work. “You won’t believe what this fucking dog did,” he said. “She flooded the basement.”
“What?!”
“Kelby managed to lock herself in the bathroom in the basement. Then she panicked and chewed through the hose that connects the toilet to the wall. I came home and there was four inches of water on the floor; I could hear the water running in the bathroom. I had to pick the lock before I could turn it off.”
“Are you joking?” I asked.
“Nope. That’s not all. She also bit my laptop screen and cracked it.”
I surveyed the damage when I got home. In addition to the hose, Kelby had gnawed off pieces of the shower stall and scratched deep gouges in the door. The entire laptop had to be replaced. There were thousands of dollars’ worth of damage.
“I have to tell you,” Brian said, “I’m starting to wonder if this is worth it.”
“Brian!” I protested. “We can’t get rid of her just because she has problems! That’s awful!”
“Well, she’s really expensive,” he said.
“With as much as we’ve invested in her, now we have to keep her,” I argued. We were in a classic sunk-costs dilemma. Brian was willing to jettison the whole Kelby project due to the money we’d already lost, while I was banking on the uncertain long-term returns of love and affection we might get.
We tried leaving her in the yard instead, and the neighbors complained that she barked incessantly from the moment we left the house in the morning until we got home in the afternoon. We gave her free run of the house, and she chewed through the curtains to get a clear view of the outside world.
One of the quirks of the house we were renting was that the kitchen was terribly designed. The neighborhood was from the 1950s, and the homes did not meet modern accepted standards in many ways—there was no electrical outlet in the bathroom, for example. The kitchen was tiny, and when it had been remodeled, they hadn’t included any pantry space. (Or drawers, for that matter. Who doesn’t include drawers in a kitchen?) We were using a small bookshelf as an open pantry area. Kelby would retrieve foodstuffs and chew them open, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in her wake. Well, a couple of times it was breadcrumbs. Other times it was grated Parmesan cheese. Flour. Bits of potato. Half-chewed onions. She chewed open a bottle of vegetable oil on the futon, forcing us to buy a new mattress. Kelby gnawed the top off a bottle of A.1. sauce on the guest bed, giving us a moment of panic that she’d had horrible diarrhea until the vinegar smell drove a search that turned up the mangled bottle. She seemed to have a special affinity for large sizes freshly purchased at Costco.
The dog howled at sirens.
We lived two blocks from a hospital.
“Seriously, Kayla, we need to think about getting rid of this dog.”
“Who is going to take a dog with mental health problems, Brian? We have to keep her. It’s not her fault that she’s crazy.”
Nadean told us we should go on The Dog Whisperer. “I’m telling you,” she said, “it would be a great episode. A combat-wounded veteran gets a dog to help with his anxiety but the dog causes even more problems. Cesar Millan can come and solve everything!”
I looked it up online—they didn’t do house calls in Virginia.
In May 2006, my sister invited me to her son’s high school graduation in North Carolina. We took Kelby with us and left her in an industrial-strength crate in our hotel room. When we stopped by to check on her after the ceremony, the hotel door was wide open. “Oh my god, have we been robbed?” I asked.
Brian pushed me behind him protectively. “Let me check it out.” He went in to check the room, then called me in to join him. “It’s Kelby,” he said. “She’s gone.”
“What?”
She had managed to break the crate—rated for a dog twice her weight. Then she tore down the window curtain, and was finally able to jostle the flapper-style handle and open the door. Kelby had escaped.
We called the police and animal control, then headed to my nephew’s party. “Surely she’ll turn up,” we assured each other.
The next day, we learned that she’d probably been sighted a couple of miles away. A car had clipped a dog matching her description running across a busy road, but the driver had been unable to catch her. Employees of a Waffle House had spotted her nearby, favoring a leg. We spent hours walking through the woods behind the restaurant in the drizzling rain calling for her. Back in the hotel room, I cried in Brian’s arms while we tried to figure out what to do.
“I have to go back to work,” I said. “But what if we leave and they find her? We’ll just have to turn right around and come back.”
“Listen, if we stay here they’ll never find her. That’s just how things go—‘A watched pot never boils.’ We should go home. When they find her, we’ll figure it out from there.”
So we left. At home, I got photos of her together and started working on a flyer to send my nephew. Then the deputy sheriff who had been helping us called.
“Your dog has been found. Kelby went into a ditch near a car dealership to get some water and couldn’t get back out; the owner spotted her and called animal control. She’s at the vet now, you can call them to find out how she’s doing.”
The vet sounded grim. “The leg is very badly injured. I don’t know it can be saved. Do you want me to amputate or do you want to take her to your vet?”
We decided to bring her home. My nephew picked her up and met us halfway. When we got her from the backseat of his car, she looked terrible—too high on painkillers and malnourished from three days hiding in the woods to do more than feebly lift her head and thump her tail twice in recognition.
Back in Virginia, our vet referred us immediately to an emergency clinic. After they evaluated her, they sat us down. “The rear right leg has suffered a de-gloving injury: all the skin was ripped off, and the tendons have been detached. An infection has set in; the smell was terrible as soon as we removed the bandage. We have her on IV fluids, antibiotics, and painkillers. You have to decide whether to amputate or try to keep the leg. Dogs usually recover well from amputations. If you try to salvage the limb, it would require multiple skin grafts, external stabilization, and repeated surgeries over a period of months.” He explained the options in detail—several thousand dollars to amputate, tens of thousands of dollars to attempt limb salvage—and left us alone to think.
“Do you think it’s worth—” Brian said gently.
“Yes!” I retorted sharply. “She’s young, otherwise healthy—of course. We can’t put her to sleep. If she had internal injuries, was in tremendous pain, might die, it would be a different conversation. But this is just a leg.”
“Okay, okay.”
Staring at Brian, I was amazed that he didn’t seem to be making the connection I was between their experiences. We had committed to this animal, just as I had committed to him—we couldn’t abandon her because she was difficult or injured. She was part of our family now. You don’t discard a loved one in a time of need. Just as I’d stood by him during the worse stages of his recovery, now the two of us had to stand by Kelby.
We agreed to amputate. “How much is a doggy prosthesis?” I joked.
“About thirty to forty thousand dollars,” the vet replied seriously.
We burst out laughing. “She can be a tripod.”
A few days later, we brought her home.
The vet warned us that we’d have to support her hindquarters with a towel while she urinated and defecated until she learned to balance. Then the vet tech brought her out. “Not this one,” she said brightly. “She already figured it out! Kelby is a trooper. I’ve never seen such a fast recovery.”
Kelby whined and wagged her tail, leaning against us one at a time.
To keep her from trying to follow me up and down the stairs like she would if we stayed upstairs, all of us stayed in the basement until she was better recovered—there was a TV, bathroom, and bed down there. Although we’d never let her get on the bed before, in the wake of her trauma we relaxed the rules, snuggling her between us as we slept.
For the first three nights, she had nightmares, yelping and kicking violently in her sleep until we woke and soothed her.
“Does our fucking dog have PTSD?” I asked. “Are you kidding me?”
“Figures,” Brian said. “It just fucking figures.”
THAT FALL, I STARTED graduate school at the American University in D.C., studying international relations with a focus on the Middle East. When I applied for my education benefits from the VA, I was also in for a rude surprise: although my enlistment paperwork clearly said “Montgomery GI Bill + $50,000 Army College Fund,” my actual entitlement was the Montgomery GI Bill plus the Army College Fund for a total of $50,000—a difference of tens of thousands of dollars. When I pressed for more information, I learned that I could appeal based on the misleading documentation—but the appeals board decided that unless my recruiter was willing to admit that he promised the higher amount, I was screwed. Frustrated, I gave up—no way would a recruiter admit to something like that, if I could even find him after all these years. “BOHICA,” I said to Brian. Bend over, here it comes again—a common saying in the Army, almost up there with SNAFU (situation normal—all fucked up). So although my main motivation for joining the Army had been finding a way to pay for grad school so I wouldn’t have to work full-time while I went to school full-time, my decision to attend a pricey private school in an expensive city, coupled with this bureaucratic letdown, shattered that dream.
“Well,” I told myself, “if I could handle a year in Iraq, I can handle this.” It would take ruthless discipline, but we would manage. Monday through Friday, I worked 6:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Then two days a week I headed to campus straight from the office, hit the gym for a brief workout, and then sat in class for hours. I tried to appreciate the beautiful campus—designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (the same guy who designed Central Park)—and enjoy the intellectual opportunities opening up before me. But I was immediately overwhelmed by the effort required to simply stay afloat.
My first day of class, the professor threw out, “Surely you are all familiar with the formation of the state.” I glanced around. Some of my fellow students were nodding. Others had the same deer-in-the-headlights expression that must have graced my own face. None were speaking up. I raised my hand. “Actually, sir, I’m not. I was a lit major in undergrad, so this is all new to me.” A few others murmured in agreement, looking relieved. He posted a list of foundational materials for us to get familiar with.
Over the next few weeks, it became clear that there was a mix of grad students in the School of International Service: those who came straight from undergrad and others like me who had worked for a few years and were now coming back to further our educations. I felt nothing in common with those who had continued without a break. They—and the undergrads in some of the cross-listed courses—were often from privileged backgrounds and seemed to understand nothing about the world as it actually functioned, as opposed to how it might operate theoretically. They looked painfully young. And college students seemed to have changed significantly in the near-decade since I’d been an undergrad. Back then, I’d dutifully called my parents once a week and had lunch with my father once a month when he came to town. No one had a cell phone, and the only people I saw with pagers were doctors and drug dealers. Now everyone had a mobile phone, and kids called their parents constantly. “Hi, Mom! We just took a test. I think it went well . . .” I overheard often. It astonished me. Weren’t they happy to get away from home, to get to figure out who they were independently? As a combat veteran, married, with a job and responsibilities, I felt completely disconnected from them.
I felt more comfortable around the other students who, like me, had been out of the ivory tower. American University’s School of International Service has a somewhat more practical than theoretical focus, compared to the other IR programs in the D.C. area, and this was reflected both in the student body—many of whom had already served abroad with NGOs—and the professors, many of whom were adjuncts with experience at the State Department or elsewhere. Only one of my fellow students was also a combat veteran the first year, a male Marine who was still serving. I was almost embarrassed at how much more comfortable I felt around him. And one of my professors had spent years in Iraq, primarily Kurdistan. When I talked to her about where I had been, the people I had met, she knew exactly what I was talking about—and was able to put it into context, to help me understand the history and politics. “Why didn’t we know this when we invaded?” I fumed to Brian. “Maybe everything wouldn’t have gone to shit if we’d actually known who the fuck we were dealing with.”
I struggled with much of the course materials the first semester. Some of the writing was so obtuse that I had to dissect it sentence by sentence, removing all the clauses to grasp the main point and then adding them back in one at a time to get the full meaning. Most of my papers came back with the annotation “Very clear”—leaving me to wonder if that was an insult or a compliment. Was I supposed to be obfuscating my ideas behind jargon and overcomplicated grammar, just to prove I could?
The theory professor who had terrified me that first day was firm: “If you cannot explain what you mean to your grandmother, you are doing a terrible job! Don’t hide behind your words,” he exhorted us. I clung to this reassurance and pushed on. And as I learned the language of international relations and the conventions of graduate-level writing, it became easier. After I got my grades for the first semester and they were all decent, I was convinced that the coursework was manageable—if the rest of my life was.
That wasn’t so certain.
BEFORE I’D STARTED CLASSES, Brian and I had discussed the sacrifices it would entail for me to go to grad school. “You understand I’ll be gone a lot,” I’d said, “right? And when I’m home, I’ll have a lot of schoolwork to do. I can’t do all the housework anymore. I can’t do most of the cooking. You have to step up, shoulder more of the household chores. This is an investment in our future—I’ll be able to earn more once I have a master’s—but I can’t do it on my own. I need your help.”
“Absolutely,” he had sworn. “No problem.”
He didn’t clean any more than before I started school. When I called him on it, he threw out what I considered to be bullshit excuses: “I’m too tall to see how dirty the floors are”. . . “Well, you’re the one who wants the house to be clean—you should clean it”. . . “You’re trying to change me—you knew I was like this when we got married.” Furious about his inability or unwillingness to step up and fulfill his promise, I lapsed into nagging and snippy comments. He’d lashed out in return. After a few screaming fights, I gave up and hired a cleaning service.
“It’s cheaper than a divorce,” I told myself. And my friends. “I just don’t get it, Zoe! He promised! I’m trying to understand where he’s coming from. He probably feels neglected, since I spend so much time in class and on schoolwork—we hardly ever hang out anymore. But it’s temporary! If I can just power through, it will only take me two years. Maybe he’s feeling insecure that I’m furthering my education. Do you think he’s worried that I’ll have a master’s and he doesn’t even have his bachelor’s? He says he doesn’t care, but maybe he does. And I want to be supportive of his feelings, but I’m just pissed off. He promised! He fucking promised he would help. And he’s not doing shit. I don’t even know if it matters why. I’m so pissed.”
Every few weeks I’d call her from the parking lot to vent. She was home with two babies, struggling to find balance in her own young marriage. “Craig doesn’t do any housework either. I’m going to school full-time, and my GI Bill is bringing in just as much as his salary. But he expects me to do all the housework, do all the work raising the kids. Yesterday I put the trash bag in front of the door so he’d remember to take it out when he left for work, and he stepped over it.”
“I put the laundry basket at the foot of the stairs and Brian does the same thing! And he told me he’s too tall to see dirt on the floor.”
“That’s a total bullshit excuse!”
“But wait,” I said. “Are you saying we’re arguing about the same things with our husbands? I’ve been blaming a lot of this on Brian’s TBI and PTSD—but maybe that isn’t it. Maybe this is just normal marriage stuff. How do I tell the difference anymore?”
BRIAN WAS DOING MUCH better in many ways. Contrary to what his case manager had said about how improvements would only come in the first eighteen months, we were seeing new cognitive gains now that he was working. Brian’s job wasn’t glamorous. But it was a return to the normal world, and he began to relearn how to live in it. After a few months of stocking shelves, he applied for the Inventory Specialist position that opened up. “I probably won’t get it,” he said, quick to downplay his own expectations. But he did—and excelled. Then they made him a primary contact for all the civilian personnel who came in with vouchers to be outfitted for deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan—his experience gave him expertise that was respected and valued.
It was a relatively low-pressure environment, and the company clearly valued its employees. Each success showed him—slowly—that he could still function, contribute, survive. Although he’d been nervous about fitting in outside the military, he made friends. They met up a few times a month to play poker, eat lasagna, and drink beer. The job gave him a purpose and a paycheck he knew he earned. Brian felt he was contributing to our finances, and that helped us maintain the more equalized realignment of power in our marriage.
Time had taught us that sporadic therapy and new medications didn’t do much good, and that sudden changes were tremendously destabilizing. Now we discovered that stable routines and increased integration back into society had a steadying effect. Having a set schedule prevented Brian from staying in bed or watching TV all day. Working and making friends helped him feel less hopeless. He was slowly climbing out of the deep hole of depression.
That didn’t mean, though, that there weren’t setbacks: forgotten appointments, personal conflicts, impulse purchases that caused checks to bounce—and though these were minor in light of how far he had come, Brian’s tendency to “catastrophize” made each a major blow. A regular person who forgot to set the alarm clock would simply say, “Shit, I’m going to be fifteen minutes late to work.” But when Brian forgot, it led to a panicked, “Shit, they’re going to fire me when I show up fifteen minutes late to work today, how are we going to be able to pay our bills when I don’t have a job?”
When his coworkers showed up late, they weren’t fired. But Brian was unable to check his negative worldview against any rational perspective. His constant focus on possible downsides could suck the joy out of life. Me: “Isn’t going to the beach going to be fun?” Him: “If it doesn’t rain the whole time.”
The clash between my attempts to jolly him into a better mood and his chronic state of moderate depression wore on me, as I’m sure it did on him—he called me a “hyper Chihuahua” when I bounced around in the morning trying to get him out of bed.
But the worst times by far were always when he was drinking. After avoiding drunkenness for a few months following the night of the gun, he’d slipped back into old habits. It was unclear to me whether he was actually addicted to alcohol or whether he simply thought he could control his drinking. If he stuck with a couple of beers things were usually fine, but I knew it would be bad when Brian progressed to shots of hard liquor. His ability to hold it together evaporated under the influence of alcohol, and he would shut down and lash out. If we were at home, sometimes I simply walked away and waited until he had slept it off. Other times, we would have screaming fights.
If we were out, though, I had much less ability to manage the situation. One night when we were out with Jason, Nadean, and other friends, I tried again to discourage hard liquor. “Just stick with beer!” I urged.
“You never want to have any fun!” Brian slurred.
I pursed my lips, nervous and tense. It was a fine line—if I managed the situation just right, sometimes I could gently ease him back from the brink. Sometimes I could lure him home with the promise of sex. Other times, nothing worked—he would be too deep into the euphoria of drinking that came right before the turn. One night after he almost started a fight that would have embroiled all our friends and a whole group of other people, Jason and the other guys were forced to practically drag him from the bar. On the way back to the car, Brian crashed through bushes, sustaining cuts and scrapes everywhere, then staggered down the middle of the road screaming profanities at the cars that honked while they swerved to avoid him. We finally all piled into Nadean’s minivan, dragging Brian with us—Nadean hardly drank, so was always the designated driver—and headed back to Jason’s apartment.
Once we were there, I got a beer and went out on the balcony to smoke and collect myself. I was mortified and scared about what might happen when we got home later. Would there be another screaming fight?
Nadean slipped out to join me. “Are you okay?” she asked.
I grimaced. “Embarrassed. Sorry you have to see him like this.”
She squeezed my arm. “It’s okay. I understand. And I’m used to it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Nadean smiled at me sympathetically. “We hung out with Brian a lot before you got here. I’ve seen him do this before. One time after he started talking shit to some people in a bar, I almost ended up in a fistfight with some girl!”
I hid my face behind my hand, flushing with embarrassment. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be! I get it. I . . . had a personal tragedy when I was young. I’ve struggled with PTSD too. The first time I met Brian, I could see it in his eyes. You could just tell he was in so much pain. When I found out he was getting married, I wondered about the woman who was going to marry him, if she knew what she was in for. Then I met you, Kayla, and realized you were really tough and you’d be able to hold your own—to take care of both of you. We all know that Brian’s a good guy who is just fighting some serious demons—and that he gets bad when he drinks.”
We hugged. It was a relief to talk to someone who understood.
OVERALL, I KNEW OBJECTIVELY that we were doing better. Our finances were in order. Brian was holding down a job, seemed to be improving. Our fights were less frequent. But there were still moments when I fantasized about leaving. It could get so draining, always worrying something would go terribly wrong, fearing a crisis.
And the worst part for me was actually not the vicious arguments—a warped little part of me saw the extreme emotion as proof of the depth of his love and passion—but the coldness. The PTSD intersected with alcohol and Brian’s notion of manliness to prevent him from showing softness—what he construed to be weakness. So if I broke down crying from a particularly vicious remark or from fear that things would never really be better, he never apologized, never knelt down to hold me, never reassured me. Even though I tried to tell myself that desiring those things was stupid, irrational, weak, it didn’t matter. My logical mind knew no one could truly promise that everything would be okay, but a childlike part of me longed to hear my life partner say it. And though the strong woman and tough feminist in me knew I could stand on my own, there was a vulnerable part of me that longed for my husband to sweep me up, nestle me close, and comfort me with his strength.
But on the good days, we were fighting back against that coldness and anger, turning to research on the overlap of TBI, PTSD, and major depression. Finding out that those recovering from TBI needed extra sleep, I stopped trying to get him out of bed early. He learned to carry his anxiety and pain meds the way he once did his rifle, never out of reach. Rather than suffering in silence, he spoke up to our friends when we were out, asking to sit with his back to the wall where he felt secure and could monitor the exits. We reached a sort of equilibrium where our problems seemed manageable, merely the mundane issues between any normal couple. Our explosive arguments decreased from weekly to monthly to every now and then.
This was enormous progress. Still, I often wondered if this was as good as it would get. Brian was bonding with his coworkers, but I was having a hard time connecting with civilian women, with whom I felt terribly awkward and out of place. Other than Nadean, I just seemed to have so little in common with them. One of Brian’s coworkers was getting married and had invited us to the wedding. His fiancée very kindly invited me to the bachelorette party. While I was there, I went out on the balcony to smoke with some of the other guests. One of them rested her hand on a shelf next to a bird’s nest. A startled bird flew off, and the woman freaked out. After shrieking, she said, “That’s the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life!” I laughed. “No, I am serious!” she said. “That is literally the most frightening thing that has happened to me in my entire life.”
I blinked at her in astonishment. Despite having my own mild bird phobia, I found this reaction completely disproportionate. What did we possibly have to talk about after that admission? I’d been to war, taken direct and indirect fire, watched a man bleed to death, pointed a loaded weapon at people, peered at trash in the road fearing IEDs . . . and the scariest thing she’d ever experienced was being startled by a tiny bird? Standing there smoking, I’d rarely felt so completely out of place. It made me wonder if I would ever fit into the civilian world again, ever be able to make friends with normal women.
And I still doubted we would ever be able to have children: there was too much volatility in our relationship. Brian could tell I wasn’t fully satisfied, and if I complained about something—even a tiny matter like him putting too much sugar in my coffee—he would half-jokingly say, “I bet your next husband will get it right.”
“Why don’t you try going to VA?” I suggested. “You’re doing so much better, but maybe they can help you go even farther. Go to counseling or get some rehab. Remember how that case manager asked why you never went to rehab? Maybe you can get some at VA, and do even better.”
He came back from an appointment at the D.C. VA Medical Center visibly shaken. “It was awful. Traffic sucked, so I was already stressed out by the time I got there. Then when I first walked in, there were veterans who are obviously homeless, and crazy guys sitting there rocking back and forth and drooling on themselves in the lobby. Is that my future?”
“No, honey, no.” I reached out, rubbed his shoulder. Brian flinched and started the finger tapping. “How was the medical side of things?” I asked, trying to gently shift his focus.
He shook his head. “It was totally fucked up. I went to where I was told to go, the green clinic. They said I was in the wrong place and sent me to the silver clinic. Then they said I should be in the red clinic. I have no idea what they were talking about. And I didn’t know where anything was, but no one would help me figure it out, so I just wandered around lost. When I finally saw a doctor, he told me I should be happy to be alive given the severity of my injuries and that he didn’t think they could do anything for me. Fuck it—forget it—I’m not going back.”
ONE EVENING A STORY about the journalist Bob Woodruff came on the news, and we watched attentively. Woodruff had also sustained a TBI in Iraq, and his recovery got lots of media coverage. It was a mixed blessing to see how well he was doing: his progress was inspirational, providing hope about how far Brian might be able to go—but it also triggered insecurity about why Brian wasn’t doing better faster, along with frustration that Woodruff had clearly gotten a much higher standard of care.
As his wife Lee spoke, she referred to herself as a “caregiver,” and my mind swirled; the room seemed to tilt and sway around me.
I had never thought of myself that way, never realized that there were others like me, that the pressures and stresses I felt might be normal. For years I had been plowing ahead on my own, never putting what we were going through into any context. Her words forced me to think instead of simply reacting.
Should I be getting therapy? Join a support group? Was there anything out there to help me deal with the pressure of managing all our household responsibilities, the strain of trying to help Brian recover without becoming his mother instead of his wife, the mixed emotions—anger at what I was going through and guilt that I was angry at a hero, grief at what might never be, fear that things might get worse? I didn’t even know where to start.
Within a few weeks, I got a phone call from VA. As the caller went through a standard script, asking if I’d suffered a blow to the head during my deployment, ever lost consciousness or seen stars, I realized it was a TBI screen—they were trying to find people who had suffered mild TBIs and not been diagnosed. “I didn’t sustain a TBI,” I told her, “but my husband did. A severe, penetrating one. And things are really difficult. Can you help us? Is there anything to help me? I’m not sure I can keep doing this alone.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but that’s not what I’m calling about.”
“Figures,” I said. Just as the Army had let us down before, I felt that we couldn’t count on the VA now. The government that was responsible for sending Brian off to war wasn’t going to take care of us—we had to take care of ourselves.
Hearing Lee Woodruff, a stranger, talk about experiences we had in common had also made me realize exactly how isolated Brian and I still were. We had no network other than a handful of supportive friends and family members. It was clear we had to change that—but we didn’t know where to begin.