Very soon my family and I will move across the United States (for the fourth time in ten years) to a town we’ve never seen (for the fifth time in ten years). But this time, we’re setting ourselves loose. We’re leaving on our own terms.
At the beginning, my husband and I were two glowy-eyed newlyweds, embarking upon a grand adventure together. After securing a stable path out of our youth and our hometown, it was the two of us against the world. I get to decide my story, I thought, giddy with excitement at the prospect of meeting new people.
And I did. We did.
We hosted barbecues and laughed around beach bonfires and were thrown not one, but two baby showers by our new people when we got pregnant with our first-born. We were held—and we also got our first taste of the reality that there was another, more grueling side to that coin. The gripping part.
The years passed, we changed latitudes, changed coasts, met more new people. Our glow flickered. He and I knew that there would be times when we’d be pulled apart, but the knowing of it didn’t soften the calcification that absence formed. Missed events, holidays, birthdays, and many of our babies’ firsts never got easier. We endured through physical distance, all the while grinding hard through the murky mental. Grinding to just reach that next promotion, that next transfer, the end of that next contract. For ten years I watched him give his everything to a cause he believed in and wanted to be an asset for. And for ten years I gave my everything to stand by his side and do whatever I could to help keep us all moving forward.
One day at a time.
Words whispered and pleaded and chanted and desperately clung to in the years since the day he left for bootcamp. All the way up to his very last day in uniform.
It’s a life so difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t been inside of it. The repetitive task of picking up every haphazard piece of our lives and moving it all to a place we’ve never seen. Cultivating a new space that will feel like home, only to sell our things or lose them in the next move. Integrating into a new community, only to leave it for good a couple short years later. A life so complicated, there is a mandatory class eery outgoing service member is required to take to prepare them for acclimating back to civilian life.
And yet…
We’re finally crossing our finish line, and I can’t help but look back now and weep. I once thought that when we reached this point I’d dust my hands off and say good riddance to the end of this much-longer-than-anticipated chapter.
But as I should know by now, nothing is ever so simple.
I reflect without the fresh-cut heartache of each hardship we faced. I now the sorrow and the uncertainty that accompanies military life—it will live in me for always. But that’s not just it anymore, it’s plenty more.
It is perseverance. It is endurance. It is accomplishment.
It is roots of love for our family, deepened through drought, flood, and the promise of sunshine each new day. And together we’ve grown. I look back at our time with the military and that’s what I see.
I’m so damn proud of us.
This is not by any means meant to be a critique of the service, only our family’s personal story. An acknowledgment and moment of gratitude for all that we’ve waded through, feeling at times that one or both of us might surely be pulled under. But however tightly we held on to each other, we never let go.
And together is how we will venture into the great, beautiful unknown that lies before us.