One of my favorite scenes in the movie Tommy Boy is when Tommy is coming back to his hometown after graduating from college. His buddy, Richard, is picking him up at the airport and gives Tommy a little grief about how long it took Tommy to get his degree. Tommy says, “You know, a lot of people go to college for seven years.” Richard replies, “Yeah, they’re called doctors.”
The day I purchased my wedding dress, I was alone.
My husband had dropped me off at a local bridal shop, I marched to the section with my size, spent several minutes perusing the selection, chose two dresses, tried each on, and strolled out of the store 30 minutes later.
I did not have my bridesmaids, mother, or mother-in-law with me (although they had previously attended dress scouting trips).
I debated sharing this post for quite some time, not because I felt I needed to keep my infertility a secret, but because I wasn’t confident I wanted complete strangers to know such private details.
However, one of the struggles women and men face when they receive a diagnosis of infertility is a lack of strong community to lift them up. You can’t receive loving support if you hide in isolation; you have to share your struggle in order to get what you need.
When military spouses are faced with a long separation from their service member, either due to deployments or training, we then have to decide whether to stay at the duty station or move home with family.
For the first three deployments, I remained at the duty station, even when my daughter (Avalyn) was born and a week later my husband, Alan, deployed to South Korea. But when my husband both received a transition MOS and a new duty station, I was given the decision to remain in Fairbanks, Alaska, or move home with family in Ohio. This time I took the leap and moved Avalyn and myself home while we wait for Alan to finish school.
We are military families. Deployments are what we do, especially for the last 15 years, and we know it. We also do TDYs, schools, trainings, and unaccompanied assignments. Plenty of separation.
Some of us do them with grace and class, like my friend who hosted an event for the company she works for with 25 parents and many small children, in her house, which looked spotless. Catered food, a mother’s helper, her hair was perfect, and we had all sorts of fun. All while on the tail-end of her spouse’s deployment, no less. She killed it like the rockstar she is, and everyone had a wonderful time.
Recently, my husband and I began the series Band of Brothers. As I was watching the struggles, laughter, tears, and journey that WWII Army Airborne soldiers went through, it wasn’t difficult to pick up on the representations of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. My husband made an off-handed comment that feeling guilty about coming home after deployments while buddies are still fighting is common.
I began to wonder if he and others around me had suffered from PTSD.
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