I Believe

My family has always really been there for me, I don’t really even remember a time when I wasn’t with my dad and little sister. We did everything with each other and relied on each other since day one. So I didn’t understand how important it is to have a family and lucky I really was for actually having and being a part of one. I don’t think it was until the fall and winter of 2010, when my dad’s fiancée was deployed over in Afghanistan, I really started to comprehend how important family was and how much you really rely on each other during times of struggle in hardship.
  I don’t remember exactly when Katie, my dad’s fiancée, told us that she was going to be deployed but I do remember the day that she left. I have really only seen my dad about 3 times in my life, and this was defiantly one of them. I can picture myself now, on the couch before I left for the bus around 6:00 am staring at the television in front of me, but too distracted to watch it. Katie emerged out of the room in her ACUs and sat down next to me with a damp blackened tissue in her hand. I stupidly mumbled to her and asked if it was time for her to go. Of course, it was I thought, but I just wanted to stall. She nodded and we hugged tightly promising to Skype and email whenever we could, and with that she was off to the airport with my dad for her last goodbye.
  I thought that saying goodbye to her was hard? I couldn’t even fathom being away from her for an entire year with all the messy time zone differences, lagged phone calls, very few terrible connection Skype calls and emails as the only real connection between us. This was bad enough for me, but for my dad and it being his actual wife to be? Well, that’s just about a million times harder. And for Katie, it sure was just as miserable being away from my dad but she has already done this twice before. My dad has been in the National Guard since 2000, but had never been deployed for a year in a war zone, thousands of miles away from his...