Every military family has a woeful story, or several, about what happened on the homefront during deployment. Mine are mostly about sick children, septic tanks and household pests run amok. Does anything good come from these difficult experiences? I explored this idea with a couple of other military wives for the Sept. 28 Spouse Calls.

Hope Metzler developed www.DeploymentLessons.org, a site where military spouses are invited to post one or two sentences about lessons they have learned in the absence of their active duty spouse.

The idea grew from a similar thread Hope began on a Family Resource Group Web site. As an FRG leader in Colorado in 2003, Hope said she wanted to help the families at home to focus on what they were learning during these difficult times.

Now living in Germany, she said her dream was to extend the idea to spouses around the world. So began the current Web site.

Hope and I met for coffee to talk about her project, and we laughed about the fact that she had lost her cell phone just days before her husband was due to go TDY. No small matter for a working mom with two small boys.

Sometimes the difficulties start early. Sometimes they are small and sometimes large, but all can be learning experiences, she said, in short absences or long ones.

"Deployments are hard," Hope said. "There's no way that I can deny the difficulty of deployment ... The major part of the initial phase is just getting through the difficulty. By about the second half of the deployment cycle, then (spouses) can see that 'I did it, I can do it.'"

Hope said the Web site is her attempt to capture that realization of the difficulty as a learning experience.

"When you look at it over all, versus the day to day, hour to hour that we live in," she said, "then you can see what you learned over time and also remember the funny things that happened."

Some of the entries in Deployment Lessons are funny and some are poignant, covering the deployment experiences from all sides. Some examples:

"I have learned that I miss my husband the most at the end of the day when the kids are in bed, the house it quiet, and it is time to turn out my bedroom light."

"I have learned that my three-year-old son believes that his daddy lives 'in the computer.'"

"I have learned that my husband's mom really loves me, and not just because my babies are beautiful!"

"I have learned that even though everything breaks right after he leaves that I can fix it, even the car."

To read more, add your own and vote on your favorites, see Hope's Web site at www.DeploymentLessons.org.

Julie Kirschbaum is another military spouse, featured in this week's Spouse Calls, who learned about turning deployment experiences into something positive. She initiated a story-telling time at deployed spouses gatherings, and told her own "awful, but now funny" tale. Click here to read it on the Spouse Calls blog thread about deployment reunions.

What have you learned from deployment? Maybe just that you never want to go through another one ...