If you’ve read any of my blog submissions on Mission Milspouse lately, you’ll likely see a pattern where I have been mostly writing about what I’ve learned being a military spouse for the past twenty years but in presented in slightly different ways.

In addition to sort of organizing my brain of those things, May is the month of military appreciation, including Military Spouse Appreciation Day, making yet another blog about military spouses that much more well timed.  

I started writing a personal blog entry a while back but didn’t finish it.

No Big surprise there-….who knew that your oldest graduating high school, wrapping up your own local job, finding a new job, and a move halfway across the country would result in some unfinished things?

18 months and counting until we are no longer a military family.

18 months and counting until we move back to the only state I ever call home.

18 months and counting until I can no longer call myself a military spouse. 

At retirement time, this is all I’ve ever really known.

It isn’t solely who I am, but it is a large part of who I am and how I became who I am.

I will no longer be a part of this community I’ve called mine for most of my adult life.

I know we will settle down in one place and make new friends and then this experience as a military spouse will be but a whisper in the wind. I know it will no longer be the biggest part of who I am but will continue to be a part of who I was. 

I am now almost a year into being a civilian spouse again. It is everything and nothing that I thought it would be. Twenty years ago, I was a young twenty something who knew nothing about anything.

Twenty years later, I’m a forty something who knows just a bit more nothing about everything. 

It is one of those things where the world I once knew keeps on spinning (as I knew it would) without me. It existed long before I ever knew it was anything and it will exist long after I’m gone.

My experiences and memories as a military spouse will likely fade over time but I don’t believe the person I became as a result of them will. 

Before my husband joined the Navy, I had hardly been outside of my home state.

Except for visiting Germany when I was in tenth grade for a school trip, I had not been on a plane. Now, I can’t even begin to count the number of times I have flown on a plane. (Partly because it is a lot but it’s mostly because I cannot remember that far back because I am old.) 

In 2018 alone, I visited 130 places, 50 cities, 6 countries.

I lived for two years in a foreign country where I did not speak the language. I met countless people from so many places. Living this life with these different experiences made me who I am today.

I’m confident it will continue to mold me in different ways even as I move further away from it.  

I learned some unique ways to do things. I learned completely new ways to do things. I learned how not to do some things. 

I learned to look at the world in shades of gray, that not everything can be seen in black and white. This was something I continued to learn over time while grace for others really hit home while we lived overseas.

Seeing how the world views you is an eye-opening experience and what one does with it can be life changing. That sounds a bit dramatic and maybe it is a little, but I also believe it to be true, dramatic or not.

I learned so much about other cultures and the ways that they do things. Growing up in small town Minnesota, you learn the basics about the world and that’s about it.

To truly learn about the world, I’m of the opinion you must go visit the world. (Always easier said than done.) I learned how to truly put myself in other people’s shoes because now I had been there.

I also learned how to look at a situation (one that I personally had never been in before) and look at how it might be affecting that person and offer them grace. 

Finally, I learned to always take the motion sickness meds on the boat to Capri, even if you don’t think you’re going to need it that day, although past experience is strongly urging you otherwise.   

All because I was a military spouse.

There are some days now when that seems to be all I can think about, how I continue to see things, through the lens of a spouse.

Then there are other days where it’s not that I forget but milspouse life is not anywhere near the forefront of my mind.

What prompts the difference in those days could be as little as seeing a post from a milspouse friend who spent the day adventuring in their new location, or the much more obvious topic of people getting new orders or movers arriving that day. 

I have found that being in the thick of military life boils down to varying degrees of surviving.

That sounds a tad doom and gloom I know but I don’t think there’s a better way to say it. There were days when I was in the thick of being a mom and did not have time for much else.

Once the boys got older, I could add other things in, things I was passionate about- things I didn’t even know I was passionate about.

Yes, any life could be viewed through this same lens of surviving, but the military spouse life has special caveats to it: deployments, possibilities of unexpected deployments, being away from family, moving, possibilities of unexpected and last-minute moving, living in base housing, and plenty of other quiet parts that aren’t necessarily said out loud.

These special circumstances allow for unique attributes as a result- it just depends on the person and what they choose to do with it.

Any part of life can add to the person you become, and I am wholly grateful for the parts of that military life that have added to who I am today.    

*To read more of Erin’s insightful work, visit her at her M:M Author Page.