Gaposis

By Jacey Eckhart

Last week I was part of a team giving speeches to a deployed squadron that was about to head home. The chaplain prepared his ‘Ten Commandments of Homecoming’ brief.  The lady from family services dropped by to remind everybody not to take over the checkbook.  Me, I was busy forgetting important stuff I wanted to tell these service members.

I hate that.  I love speaking with the service members, but I hate not being able to tell them every single thing they need to know.  These guys get the basics of Homecoming from the command. They really do. For example, we always remember to tell the service member to get involved with the family again. To give it time. To wait to reassert their authority over teenagers. 

But the official folks forget to tell the service members that if they plan to do this deployment thing more than once in their lives, they gotta learn the emotional subtleties, too.  Because it is all about the subtleties. We never do remember to tell them about the subtle stuff like "Gaposis.”

Yeah, Gaposis.  It’s a technical term that I just invented.  Gaposis refers to the barely perceptible gaps in family life that open the first few days in which someone comes home from deployment. 

Here is how it usually works.  A guy gets home and the first day is all about him.  We family members have to kiss him, feed him, pat him, celebrate him, talk him up, call his mom.  Then we notice that the poor guy is exhausted and suffering from the time zone change so we put him to bed. 

That’s all well and good. Very, very, verrrrrrrry good.  But the next day no one tells the service member that all that coddling will start winding down before he actually has the energy to get back on board with the family.  No one tells him that there will be a test.  That the home phone will ring.  There will be a certain pause, a definite, measurable gaposis in which the entire family is waiting for him to jump up and answer the phone.

If the service member hasn’t been warned to watch out for gaposis, he probably won’t automatically jump up to get the phone.  He knows the call is not for him.  He hasn’t been home in seven or eight months.  He hasn’t placed any calls.  If his work was calling, they’d use the cell phone.  It makes sense for him to let someone else get the phone.  Still, there is a pronounced pause.  Because this is gaposis. It is the family silently creating a space for the service member to take back his place as a genuine, all-purpose, 100 percent phone-answering member of the family.

Service members report that the same thing happens when a toddler falls down and cries.  Or when a preschooler needs to be put to bed.  Or someone needs to be driven to Sarah’s house.  A gap opens up in which everyone is waiting for the service member to jump in and do—no matter how tired he is.  Female service members report that they don’t even get the benefit of the gaposis—their families expect that they will have already jumped in and done.
 
The problem with gaposis is that it is full of opportunities for our service members—male and female-- to feel dumb.  After months away from the family, they don’t know why the toddler is crying or how to fix it.   They don’t know that the preschooler now hates to get his hair washed so you have to use the SpongeBob visor.  They could not find Sarah’s house if it was lit up with Christmas lights in July.  No wonder our returnees want to ignore the gaposis.

Someone should tell them that they can’t.  They can’t afford not to jump on the gaposis.  To ask how.  To wonder why.  To feel dumb.  That is part of the price of deployment.  Service members have to be willing to jump back on the family merry-go-round in these low key ways.  Gaposis is subtle.  We family members know it is subtle and lasts for such a short time.  So our service members have to be ready.  They have to pay attention.  They have to leap wildly, clumsily, thoroughly on every gaposis that comes their way.