Limbo still bites

I'm not just sitting around doing nothing.  OK, cards on the table, I do take a lot of naps.  And I do sit around quite a bit.  I'm usually working a crossword puzzle or a cross stitch to not be a total lump. I also made a crocheted blanket, because why not. And I've seen a number of people:

Coffee with Donna.
Dinner with Anne.
Lunch with Alaina.
Dinner with Kelly.
Dinner with Alaina and Lisa and their families.
An Amman reunion that celebrated a retirement with Sue, Ro/Ragini, Annie, Peter/Paivi, Susanna/Sean, Sandra/Aaron, Eric, Manju, and Adnan/Claire.
And a lunch with another Amman group of Jenna, Shawn, Annie, and Beth.

I've made dinner once a week here in my parents' home (butter chicken, enchiladas, dinner salad, brunch for dinner, thai curry, orange chicken). Jonathon and I had a LotR extended-version marathon at the Alamo Drafthouse (12.5 hours in the front row....).  I go to Jazzercise once a week with my mom. Then there is laundry, tea and coffee drinking, book reading, packing and sending boxes of stuff to the kids who I don't see.  All under the haze of worry about things I can't control, so I make do.

The kids seem to be chugging along. Becca decided to skip her fall quarter and continue working for a few more months. She's promised she'll go back and finish her degree afterwards.  Katherine is working more and I'm glad I get to see her every month or so, most recently for Jonathon's birthday dinner. Nicholas is out in the field a lot so I don't hear as much as I'd like, but he got his first tattoo so now it's only Jonathon in the family without any ink (my guess is it'll stay that way). Jonathon has almost completed his required hours for his learner's permit and has an appointment for his visa, so we finally have baby steps forward on those fronts. Ian is at post and doing OK.  The highlight this week is he's opened his section for some working dog training.  Each day packs of pups come through and look for whatever it is they look for, and then the team gets to pet them all.  Sounds like a perfect match.

So nothing is ideal.  We all miss each other (except for J, who is just about sick of me right now - this is not how most 18yo want to spend their super long summer) and aside from me everyone has structure in their day in places far away which is great yet makes it hard to see each other. It heartens me to know they are all doing as well as they can under their various circumstances.

But yeah.  I miss them.

We're half way through August.

There's so much running through my head, and at the same time so little.  The broken record is well past getting old.  My husband is still in Baghdad.  I am still in VA.  Jonathon still doesn't have a visa for school (he made it into Essex! But that apparently was the "easy" part).  The car still isn't registered in GA.  There's a lot of "still....".  The past 6 weeks have felt like taking painful slow steps through a river of molasses, then turning around and seeing you can still touch the departed shore.  It's mind-numbing, it's frustrating, it's exhausting. Some days I'm cool with it - it is what it is, keep your chin up - and other days I curl up in the twin bed in the room I slept in in high school and try to remember to be grateful that I have a bed in a bedroom where I can stay as long as I need to while I wait.

Maybe we'll hear something positive today.  Maybe I can take a giant step forward in something. Anything. Maybe one part of all this will be finished/settled/decided one way or the other.  Because that's the thing.  Tell me hard truths.  Tell me what I need to do.  Tell me there is a decision point somewhere and once it's past, it is done.

This limbo bites.