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Until a spouse has deployed you never really have an idea of what it is that you will be getting into. Prior to their leaving there is a landslide of horror stories that are told by everyone. Half of them are most likely urban legends the others are just too common to ignore and are the last thing that a person wants to hear. There is the woman has committed herself to the fetal position on the couch while the young children run around the house like wild savages. There is also the common story of the jaded spouse who is either bored or maniacal that takes advantage of her new found financial power and takes her significant other for the financial ride of a lifetime. The stories all come within months of deployment and as you make the final preparations for the soldier's departure they are in the back of your mind. On top of the urban legends there is the advice that everyone expects you to take "Stay busy." This is so that we as military spouses, whose minds may just be too fragile to deal with the situation at hand, can keep busy enough so that you don't have to think. My favorite, the one that I was told on the very day that my husband left was "Now, don't turn to drinking. We had several wives turn into alcoholics during their husband's deployment." I was too scared to have wine for a week. The reality is as tough as everyone makes it sound, people survive and it doesn't have to necessarily be so scary.

There is depression that can come and a bit of jealousy when you are the third wheel with the friends you used to double date with. However, staying so busy that there is no time to think isn't good either. As with most things in life, if kept bottled up they'll surface with a vengeance. I threw out the advice that was given to me: the stay busy, stay close to the base and don't watch the news. It was with in months after my husband left that I realized that these "pearls of wisdom" wouldn't work for me. That was the thing; I had to do what worked for me not for Jane Doe around the corner or what was in some military manual as a standard for how to help people survive deployment. A person's feelings and methods for coping with hard situations vary. There is no such thing as personal feelings standard issue fix it all. When it came to coping with my husband's deployment I had to find out what it was that worked for me.

The first thing that I did was deal with my feelings. I purged some of the stress from my life. It's understandable that not every stressor

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