MY ARMY LIFE... [Guest Blogger]

MY ARMY LIFE...

My husband joined the Army in the summer of 2009. Our son was barely a year old and everything seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. It felt as if he went from sitting in a recruiter’s office, to basic training, to being deployed all in a matter of days! I had no experience with the military and no idea what we were getting into or what to expect. Luckily for me, it has been one of the best adventures of our lives.

We moved from Colorado to Fort Campbell, Kentucky as soon as my husband graduated from AIT. I was 22 years old and as exciting as it was, it was also terrifying. I had never lived anywhere other than Colorado and I had always lived within minutes of family. This was going to be a huge change and I am so thankful I had an amazing support system and such a strong and supportive partner. When things got scary, all I had to do was lean on him and everything just felt okay. As cheesy as it sounds, we knew it would be fine as long as we were together and supporting each other.

About a month after we moved to Fort Campbell we found out we were pregnant! We were so excited, but again, terrified because my husband was deploying in just a couple months. The idea of going through the pregnancy alone was a scary one, but for us it was the right choice. Separations from your family are inevitable when you are part of the military so you just make the best of them. We felt that him missing out on most of the pregnancy was a better option than him missing out on the first year of the baby’s life. Honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. When I went in for my ultrasound to find out the gender, he was able to call as soon as my appointment was over so we found out (almost) together that we were having a girl! We had planned on him being on Skype during the birth, but unfortunately that didn’t work out. He was away on a mission when I went into labor and he was able to reach me before the Red Cross message reached him, so I was able to tell him about her birth myself. He was able to get home very quickly for his R&R though and got home when our daughter was just about a week old. R&R is hard to describe and almost like an alternate reality. There is a dark cloud looming the entire time, no matter how much you try to ignore it. From the second he walked off the plane the countdown to when he would have to leave again was on and that was a terrible feeling. Somehow we pushed that aside and had a wonderful two weeks together with our two kids. 

Homecoming was even more surreal than R&R. As I was hugging my husband I could feel myself second guessing my senses and trying to figure out if it was real this time or if I was dreaming. It didn’t help that he didn’t get in until 2AM either. It really did take awhile to sink in that he was home and that he was home to stay. There was definitely a honeymoon period where we were so glad to be together again, nothing else seemed to matter. And then reality set in. Transitioning back into our life was very hard on our whole family. I cannot imagine being deployed for so long and coming home to act as if nothing had changed. For us, it was a struggle letting someone else into our daily routine. We all had to make changes and be flexible, but in the end everything settled back down and things felt as if he had never left.

This is a very much condensed version of what it has been like, for me, to be an Army wife. At the end of the day I am still a mom, a college student and Matt’s wife.

I also recently joined the Scentsy team as an Independent Consultant. Feel free to join my FB group or check out my website.

 *A special THANK YOU to Stephani, a fellow Army Wife who has added Scentsy to her busy life as an Army Wife!

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