Well, this isn’t exactly the “welcome home” I expected to come back to after months on the open ocean, but I can’t say I’m surprised. And as much as I’ve always feared this day, the writing is on the wall, so there’s no reason for me trying to swear-off what’s become obvious:

My wife has been learning English while I’ve been on deployment, and now she’s probably going to leave me once she comes to understand what an insufferable, fraudulent and oafish manchild I am.

It might sound like I’m overreacting, but I really have no doubt that once Sukhon is able to comprehend well beyond the basic words and phrases I taught her during the early days of our marriage (“Need beer,” “Bring me remote,” and “Back needs shaving,” among them), then there’s no way I’ll be able to keep hiding behind the false persona I’ve worked so hard to maintain ever since I found her on that “Thai Brides” website when I was stationed in Japan.

For example: Sukhon’s curious nature and evolving ability to communicate with other English speakers is surely going to lead to her discovering that I never deployed with the SEALs as their holodeck officer during the Bin Laden raid, that my being perpetually out of fitness regs has zero to do with some top secret Navy program researching the ability of sailors to survive on nothing but Nutella, bacon and Four Loko, and she’s for sure going to one day learn that those thousands of photos I’ve downloaded from the Internet are in no way connected to me doing “research” into developing a superior female shaving lotion, but rather that I just have a prevalent whipped cream and armpit fetish.