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June 10, 2007

By Tiffany Harvath

I think my husband values me much more when we are apart.

Lest that above comment be taken the wrong way, I simply mean he is so much more mushy, lovey-dovey and appreciative of me when he is furthest from me.

I get the best voice mails from him on my cell phone, where he tells me how much he adores me and how much I mean to him. I save messages from him on my home answering machine to listen to frequently, as he talks of how much I mean to him. He sends me love poems via e-mail and I even get love notes in the regular mail from him.

Somehow, when he is gone, it's like we forget all the petty stuff married couples argue about and only remember the good times we have had. It's like everything else is jut superficial, and instead of the remembering those things that made us quarrel, we remember the times we've laughed. And the occasional times we've made up.

Those are fun to recall too.

My husband and I met and got married in Alaska, which is where I grew up. After his tour of duty is Alaska was completed, we got stationed in Hawaii.

It's was a tough job, but somebody had to do it.

I adored Hawaii, and I adored my new husband. We both discovered the mutual adoration was much greater when we were apart.

His job in Hawaii consisted of working for the Central Identification Laboratory, flying into former combat areas from both World Wars, the Korean War and the Vietnam conflict. He would search for veteran remains of soldiers still missing in action from those decades earlier conflicts, and do his best with a carefully selected team to identify the remains and send them back home to the United States.

It was a job that entailed he be gone for up to three months at a time, and then home for maybe one month before heading out onto foreign soil again.

During his trips, we would talk on the phone whenever we could and send each other copiously long and sappy e-mails.

We got to know each other even better the longer we were apart, and, more importantly, we appreciated each other so much more for it.

I discovered that small events when he was home would loom large in my mind when we were apart while we were living in Hawaii, and that carries through to today.

To this day, I cannot recall any of the myriad of inconsequential arguments I know we had, but I can recall dancing with him underneath a Hawaiian sunset on Maui, and still remember him tickling me to make me miss a shot when we played shuffleboard at a local Irish pub in Waikiki.

I remember how he looked at me the in the restaurant where we ate dinner the night before he deployed to Iraq, and I remember him falling asleep on the couch with our infant daughter in his arms, both of them happily snoring the afternoon away.

I remember him catching me in the kitchen when I was cooking dinner and stealing a kiss, and our son making gagging noises when he caught us.

I remember the day I told him I was pregnant with what turned out to be our son a few weeks after we left Hawaii the first time, and the day I told him I was pregnant with our daughter a few weeks after we left from a Hawaiian vacation the second time.

On a side note, we are no longer taking vacations in Hawaii. The souvenirs we keep bringing back are just too darn expensive.

To this day, I still stay up until the early morning hours to complete e-mail messages to him, and scour the Internet looking for jokes to forward to him that might make him laugh.

Now, almost a decade and two children and two cats later, we still have some of our best conversations through the phone and e-mail.

We've discovered, when we are so far apart, that we truly are more in love than ever.

Those things that seem to fade unnoticed in our day-to-day existence when we are always around each other suddenly take on so much more importance and prominence when we are separated.

The reasons we fell in love suddenly make themselves apparent all over again, and I get schoolgirl giddy when the caller id shows me his number.

And the messages I get from him, through e-mail, the mailman, my cell phone or my answering machine make me smile and cry all at once. Because when I'm not there to answer the phone, he never fails to tell me how much he adores me and what I mean to him in whatever recording device he can locate.

That's why I have almost a dozen messages from him from several months saved on my answering machine, and that's why, whenever I need to cheer up, all I have to do is hit &#8220play” on the recorder and have his voice fill the room.

And that's why I know we value each other so much more when we are apart, because it helps us to remember exactly what we mean to each other when we are together again.

Tiffany Horvath is the mother of two and the stepmother of one. Her husband, Drew, is deployed to Iraq. She writes every Sunday abut life at home for the wife of a deployed soldier.