Fast fact: Our blog will publish it’s 3000th (yes, you read that right!) blog post in 2023. All of the content is brought to you by empowered experience volunteer bloggers and insightful expert bloggers. You name a topic that a military spouse or organization could write about, we’ve probably got it. Current topics include PCS, deployment, parenting, finances, solidarity, humor, milspouse experiences, expert advice, and more. And if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can always join us as a blogger to share your story!
Here are the top stories for the week of June 1, 2020, straight from AWN News 6 Correspondent, Jolene McNutt:
• DoD Bans Photographs from Officer and Enlisted Promotion Boards
* Recycling Innovation: Plastic Bottles Find New Life
* Military Families Have Free Access to Digital Library
* This Week in History
Every two or three years a battle happens for military families who are PCSing.
That battlefield is your home, and the casualties are not only your possessions, but your sense of calm, serenity, and sense of right and wrong.
I’m talking about moving.
Some battles are so epic, it spawns a Facebook group with thousands of members consisting of military families that have faced moving horror stories. They turn to this group not only for retribution solutions, but also to simply share their grief, anger, and bewilderment.
Military life is hard enough, and plenty of us know that, but this season of life is particularly hard due to COVID restrictions.
It’s more difficult to make friends.
It’s more difficult for our children to find friends.
Many of us have already found out our kids will be doing virtual schooling in the fall, while others await a decision.
And some of us are holding on to that last strand of sanity, preventing ourselves from falling apart simply because we have to keep on keepin’ on.
This is how life goes, even though this might not feel like living.
A new friend and fellow milspouse just embarked on her first deployment, and she was telling me about some things she had successfully accomplished while her husband was gone.
As she accomplishes a task that perhaps her husband would have normally taken care of, she gives herself an imaginary pat on the back, takes a picture, and sends it to her husband with the hashtag #takingcareofbusiness. It’s become a cute way for her to share what’s going on day to day, build her confidence that she can do this, and also remind her husband that she’s doing just fine.
I thought it was such a great idea, so it got me thinking about the last 16 years of Army wife life and all the unique skills that I have developed, thanks to those Army-ordered times of separation.
Now that I have moved into our house (albeit, without our HHG which are somewhere on a container ship in the Atlantic Ocean at this moment), I can breathe a nice, full breath knowing we successfully navigated an OCONUS PCS right smack-dab in the middle of COVID.
I’m not writing you today to tell you about a PCS during COVID, but rather, about a couple important and helpful tips we used to PCS from an OCONUS duty station, because that’s a whole new ball of wax with more opinions on the rules than those put forth by medical and political Facebook experts.
Here are six pro tips:
When I was in high school, my four girlfriends and I would all bring bagged lunches so we could race to my friend Christina’s house every single lunch break so we could catch as many minutes as possible of Jerry Springer… I’m not even joking. If you’ve never seen it, let me break it down for you: it’s a hot mess of a talk show full of angry, cheating spouses, paternity tests, on-stage fistfights broken up by bouncers, best friends being torn apart by lies, and the list goes on. It was a way to watch all of these crazy things, then turn it off and go back to your normal day and think to yourself, “Wow, I’m so glad my life is not like that.”
I mean, why air all of your family’s dirty laundry in such a public way? Oh yeah, because people love to watch it—me and my 16-year-old friends included.
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