When I have sat down to think about my blog and the direction I want it to go in, the first thing I think about is, "Why did I start blogging in the first place?" The question is closely tied to my life. I started blogging because I like writing. I like writing and felt that I couldn't do a lot of it with a toddler and infant twins. I felt like we had a busy life that was somewhat different than the civilian friends I know because my husband is in the military. I felt like we are a military family trying to put a lot of emphasis on family, because we do know that my husband is going to be career military, staying in until he retires. I felt like in the community of military families, it is good for us to talk about our search for "normalcy" and to stick together with our unique set of challenges. I felt like talking about these challenges in a public way-- on my blog-- would help shed light on our community and to overlap the similarities as a military family with our civilian friends. We would be able to find the vocabulary to talk about lifestyles. Because even in our mundane, day to day life, the military aspect is always there, always under the surface, always taking more time, demanding more, and being present on our mind. I feel like since I started this blog I have had a lot of great conversations with people-- in person with my friends, over email with blog readers, and in the comments on my blog and Facebook page-- over life as a military family and life with lots of kids and finding this common ground that we all share as parents and spouses.
This has been an outlet for me. A way for me to talk about the things on my mind. The struggles we have had, the loneliness of being a military spouse, the loneliness of being a mom to multiples and a mom to many, the loneliness of miscarriages and pregnancy complications. The struggles of parenting through depression and from moving every 1-3 years. The struggle to make friends at each duty station as our family grows. The struggle to continuously be supportive of my spouse's career, no matter the cost to myself or our family. The isolation when explaining what exactly a military spouse is called to do and how exactly that is different-- because we still have our own lives, we still have our children's lives, we are moving, we will move again, we are settling in to new duty stations and looking forward to the next, we are far away from friends, we are missing support from past duty stations, we have deployments looming over us or are adjusting back to life under one roof after deployment, and we still have school pick up! We live in houses we don't love in cities we thought we would never be in further from familiar friends and family than we want to be and we have to constantly (constantly) make the most of it. I have been a military spouse for a decade and have PCS'd 5 times and we are on our second sea tour. Our tours have given us a wide spectrum of great support, lack of support, heavy military presence, remote military presence in a civilian area, close to family, far from family, living across the street from your best friend... I mean, the variables are never ending. And I struggle with wishing that one duty station was like another (even if I didn't love that past duty station when we were there) or wishing our kids were at different ages and stages at a duty station or whatever. It is hard not to compare... because the grass is always greener, eh?
It is hard to pick through all of those challenges and to say, "YES. I can build a life on this." I feel like there are people who do that and sometimes it is hard not to judge and think, "Well, they can only do that so easily because they've only been in the military for 5 years" or "This is only their second duty station." After all these moves and the list of things I've had to do by myself and the things my husband has missed, I doubt whether this is the life for me. Whether this community is the right one for me. Am I cut out for this?
The emails I get from my blog followers and the comments I receive on my posts let me know I am not the only one, regardless of how many years and duty stations. I know that I am not the only person who feels the way I do. I know that in this ever-changing world of being a military spouse, I AM NOT ALONE. It may feel that way at times, but when I blog and put my thoughts out there, I hear a resounding YES. I feel like we are all searching for this sense of normalcy. We have all gone through a difficult duty station. We have all said that good-bye to a house or a friend or a city that crushed us. We have all eagerly anticipated a duty station or a tour only to discover it was nothing like we hoped it would be. We have all walked through fire with a spouse deployed, a spouse working insane hours, across country from family and wept each night at how hard this life is and wondered why we do this. We have all received bad news in the wee hours in the morning over the phone. We have all sent Red Cross messages to a deployed spouse and cried knowing he would receive that news alone, in a cold metal tube floating in the middle of the ocean. We have all been frustrated and thwarted by our lack of "correct" Power of Attorney or been turned away because our children are missing forms from pediatricians when we cannot get them in that quickly after a PCS. We have all spent nights awake, staring at computer screens, trying to find housing, schools, teams, libraries... anything to get our children excited about the upcoming upheaval. We have all spent nights holding crying children as they asked for a parent who's not there, for friends who are not there, for schools we don't live near, for rooms we will never be in again. We have all felt that aching pressure in our chest as the wind leaves our lungs and we struggle to take a breath because there is nothing-- nothing-- we can do to make it better for our children. We don't have the answers. We cannot make promises. We wipe away tears and hold hands and pray that we are doing the right thing.
When I think about why I started blogging, the question of why we are staying in the military plagues me. Why are we doing this? Why are we putting ourselves through this? Because one thing we constantly hear is how we chose this. There are a lot of things I think we chose about being a military family, but some of the things we did not choose. Some things, you never even dream of until you are walking down that road and you have no choice but to continue forward. I do not think we realized at what cost our retirement would come and I know that I ask, "Is this worth it?" nearly every day. I don't know if it is worth it. My husband's commitment ends at 14.5 years-- 5.5 years away from retirement, one sea tour. Both he and I feel that our future selves would kick our younger selves for giving up that close to retirement. We both think, "We can do one more sea tour." And we both think, "Let's see how we feel after that," when we think about the number of years past 20 we would be open to. One thing the military life has taught us is that no matter what we say now, doesn't mean how we will think in the future. Talking to people who have been in much longer than we have, that seems to be pretty normal. Most of them didn't think they would be career when they first joined and yet, here they are.
The challenges I have are the same challenges every military spouse has. How do we find happiness and make a life when we move so often? When our spouse comes and goes and misses so much? How do we feel connected so far away from people we love? Little things can be difficult. Finding pediatricians that work well with the asthma plan we have for our 2 asthmatics. Grocery shopping in a new place when Costco is so far way and we have a family of 7. Making close, authentic adult friendships in a world where people are used to saying good-bye. Back to school shopping when all the stores we are used to shopping at aren't at our current duty station. Sometimes it feels like this life isn't real. That we are setting up house for a couple of years before we move on and that when we finally get out of the military, then we will start "real" life. I struggle with that because there are a lot of things that I say, "Well, at our next duty station, we need to live closer to Costco" or "At our next duty station, we need a house with a basement" or "At our next duty station, the Y needs to have a better system for signing up for swim lessons." Whatever it is, big or small, I write things off that this life is temporary. One day, when we stop moving and we live closer to family and friends and we have our forever house in our forever school district with the yard we want and the Costco around the corner... What military family doesn't struggle with that thinking?
Normalcy. That's why I blog. I blog to connect to my community. To talk about things that we go through as a military family. What works for us as at a duty station. What doesn't work for us. Our fears. Our struggles. I blog because life with 5 children is crazy. Life with identical twins is crazy. Life with asthmatics is crazy. Life with a husband on submarines is crazy. Basically, life is crazy. It is hard to talk about those struggles. Hard because I don't want to come across that I don't love my family or that my children aren't amazing (because they truly are). There is so much I am thankful for with this military life. I love our life. I love our busy house. I even love all the unique opportunities we have had as a military family. I grew up in the Northwest and California; my husband is from the south. Now I have lived in (not just visited) all the corners of the United States, including Hawaii. Our children are experiencing all sorts of things they wouldn't get to experience if they grew up in one place. They are making friends from all different backgrounds, from all different places, with all different abilities. I love that. I am incredibly proud of my husband. This life isn't easy and his struggles and challenges are vastly different than ours. I admire his ability to do this job. With all this craziness and busy-ness, it is nice to carve out a space where I can bring normalcy to our lifestyle and to connect with others going through the same things.
I have debated taking my blog down for good. My self-esteem and self-confidence were shot after the struggles of the past 2 years and overcoming that depression. I didn't think I had something to add to a conversation that I am sure is going on elsewhere. As the summer went on and the weeks passed, I found myself looking forward to the start of school, the deadline I had given myself to put up a new blog post. That's when I decided that even if I am saying things that are already out there or even if someone else is having a better conversation about it than I am, this is my little blog space and I want to continue posting. I want to articulate what we are going through. I want the emails I receive to keep coming. I have made in real life friends from my blog. I have exchanged emails from military families all over the world. When I hit publish on an exceptionally difficult or close to my heart blog post and get an email saying, "ME TOO," I feel like maybe I helped someone. Because there is comfort in knowing that someone else is walking the road you are on and someone else is trying to make sense of it. It helps to get that support, no matter if it comes from an email halfway around the world from a spouse you have never met.
I have a couple of favorite quotes that I pull courage from. One of them is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez quote: "What happens in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it." The other is from John Mason Good: "Happiness consists in activity. It is a running stream, not a stagnant pool." These remind me of a verse in Philippians, my favorite book of the Bible, Philippians 3:17b: "But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead." I do not know what this life holds for us. I do not know how the next 3 tours will go for my Navy family. I do not know if I will live across the street from my best friend again or if our next sea tour will be the best boat ever. Who knows. But my story is my own. For now, I want to keep blogging, keep searching for the common thread, that sense of normalcy. And maybe, just maybe, this will be a way for me to write our story.
This has been an outlet for me. A way for me to talk about the things on my mind. The struggles we have had, the loneliness of being a military spouse, the loneliness of being a mom to multiples and a mom to many, the loneliness of miscarriages and pregnancy complications. The struggles of parenting through depression and from moving every 1-3 years. The struggle to make friends at each duty station as our family grows. The struggle to continuously be supportive of my spouse's career, no matter the cost to myself or our family. The isolation when explaining what exactly a military spouse is called to do and how exactly that is different-- because we still have our own lives, we still have our children's lives, we are moving, we will move again, we are settling in to new duty stations and looking forward to the next, we are far away from friends, we are missing support from past duty stations, we have deployments looming over us or are adjusting back to life under one roof after deployment, and we still have school pick up! We live in houses we don't love in cities we thought we would never be in further from familiar friends and family than we want to be and we have to constantly (constantly) make the most of it. I have been a military spouse for a decade and have PCS'd 5 times and we are on our second sea tour. Our tours have given us a wide spectrum of great support, lack of support, heavy military presence, remote military presence in a civilian area, close to family, far from family, living across the street from your best friend... I mean, the variables are never ending. And I struggle with wishing that one duty station was like another (even if I didn't love that past duty station when we were there) or wishing our kids were at different ages and stages at a duty station or whatever. It is hard not to compare... because the grass is always greener, eh?
It is hard to pick through all of those challenges and to say, "YES. I can build a life on this." I feel like there are people who do that and sometimes it is hard not to judge and think, "Well, they can only do that so easily because they've only been in the military for 5 years" or "This is only their second duty station." After all these moves and the list of things I've had to do by myself and the things my husband has missed, I doubt whether this is the life for me. Whether this community is the right one for me. Am I cut out for this?
The emails I get from my blog followers and the comments I receive on my posts let me know I am not the only one, regardless of how many years and duty stations. I know that I am not the only person who feels the way I do. I know that in this ever-changing world of being a military spouse, I AM NOT ALONE. It may feel that way at times, but when I blog and put my thoughts out there, I hear a resounding YES. I feel like we are all searching for this sense of normalcy. We have all gone through a difficult duty station. We have all said that good-bye to a house or a friend or a city that crushed us. We have all eagerly anticipated a duty station or a tour only to discover it was nothing like we hoped it would be. We have all walked through fire with a spouse deployed, a spouse working insane hours, across country from family and wept each night at how hard this life is and wondered why we do this. We have all received bad news in the wee hours in the morning over the phone. We have all sent Red Cross messages to a deployed spouse and cried knowing he would receive that news alone, in a cold metal tube floating in the middle of the ocean. We have all been frustrated and thwarted by our lack of "correct" Power of Attorney or been turned away because our children are missing forms from pediatricians when we cannot get them in that quickly after a PCS. We have all spent nights awake, staring at computer screens, trying to find housing, schools, teams, libraries... anything to get our children excited about the upcoming upheaval. We have all spent nights holding crying children as they asked for a parent who's not there, for friends who are not there, for schools we don't live near, for rooms we will never be in again. We have all felt that aching pressure in our chest as the wind leaves our lungs and we struggle to take a breath because there is nothing-- nothing-- we can do to make it better for our children. We don't have the answers. We cannot make promises. We wipe away tears and hold hands and pray that we are doing the right thing.
When I think about why I started blogging, the question of why we are staying in the military plagues me. Why are we doing this? Why are we putting ourselves through this? Because one thing we constantly hear is how we chose this. There are a lot of things I think we chose about being a military family, but some of the things we did not choose. Some things, you never even dream of until you are walking down that road and you have no choice but to continue forward. I do not think we realized at what cost our retirement would come and I know that I ask, "Is this worth it?" nearly every day. I don't know if it is worth it. My husband's commitment ends at 14.5 years-- 5.5 years away from retirement, one sea tour. Both he and I feel that our future selves would kick our younger selves for giving up that close to retirement. We both think, "We can do one more sea tour." And we both think, "Let's see how we feel after that," when we think about the number of years past 20 we would be open to. One thing the military life has taught us is that no matter what we say now, doesn't mean how we will think in the future. Talking to people who have been in much longer than we have, that seems to be pretty normal. Most of them didn't think they would be career when they first joined and yet, here they are.
The challenges I have are the same challenges every military spouse has. How do we find happiness and make a life when we move so often? When our spouse comes and goes and misses so much? How do we feel connected so far away from people we love? Little things can be difficult. Finding pediatricians that work well with the asthma plan we have for our 2 asthmatics. Grocery shopping in a new place when Costco is so far way and we have a family of 7. Making close, authentic adult friendships in a world where people are used to saying good-bye. Back to school shopping when all the stores we are used to shopping at aren't at our current duty station. Sometimes it feels like this life isn't real. That we are setting up house for a couple of years before we move on and that when we finally get out of the military, then we will start "real" life. I struggle with that because there are a lot of things that I say, "Well, at our next duty station, we need to live closer to Costco" or "At our next duty station, we need a house with a basement" or "At our next duty station, the Y needs to have a better system for signing up for swim lessons." Whatever it is, big or small, I write things off that this life is temporary. One day, when we stop moving and we live closer to family and friends and we have our forever house in our forever school district with the yard we want and the Costco around the corner... What military family doesn't struggle with that thinking?
Normalcy. That's why I blog. I blog to connect to my community. To talk about things that we go through as a military family. What works for us as at a duty station. What doesn't work for us. Our fears. Our struggles. I blog because life with 5 children is crazy. Life with identical twins is crazy. Life with asthmatics is crazy. Life with a husband on submarines is crazy. Basically, life is crazy. It is hard to talk about those struggles. Hard because I don't want to come across that I don't love my family or that my children aren't amazing (because they truly are). There is so much I am thankful for with this military life. I love our life. I love our busy house. I even love all the unique opportunities we have had as a military family. I grew up in the Northwest and California; my husband is from the south. Now I have lived in (not just visited) all the corners of the United States, including Hawaii. Our children are experiencing all sorts of things they wouldn't get to experience if they grew up in one place. They are making friends from all different backgrounds, from all different places, with all different abilities. I love that. I am incredibly proud of my husband. This life isn't easy and his struggles and challenges are vastly different than ours. I admire his ability to do this job. With all this craziness and busy-ness, it is nice to carve out a space where I can bring normalcy to our lifestyle and to connect with others going through the same things.
I have debated taking my blog down for good. My self-esteem and self-confidence were shot after the struggles of the past 2 years and overcoming that depression. I didn't think I had something to add to a conversation that I am sure is going on elsewhere. As the summer went on and the weeks passed, I found myself looking forward to the start of school, the deadline I had given myself to put up a new blog post. That's when I decided that even if I am saying things that are already out there or even if someone else is having a better conversation about it than I am, this is my little blog space and I want to continue posting. I want to articulate what we are going through. I want the emails I receive to keep coming. I have made in real life friends from my blog. I have exchanged emails from military families all over the world. When I hit publish on an exceptionally difficult or close to my heart blog post and get an email saying, "ME TOO," I feel like maybe I helped someone. Because there is comfort in knowing that someone else is walking the road you are on and someone else is trying to make sense of it. It helps to get that support, no matter if it comes from an email halfway around the world from a spouse you have never met.
I have a couple of favorite quotes that I pull courage from. One of them is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez quote: "What happens in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it." The other is from John Mason Good: "Happiness consists in activity. It is a running stream, not a stagnant pool." These remind me of a verse in Philippians, my favorite book of the Bible, Philippians 3:17b: "But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead." I do not know what this life holds for us. I do not know how the next 3 tours will go for my Navy family. I do not know if I will live across the street from my best friend again or if our next sea tour will be the best boat ever. Who knows. But my story is my own. For now, I want to keep blogging, keep searching for the common thread, that sense of normalcy. And maybe, just maybe, this will be a way for me to write our story.
Comments