I resisted it at first, the friendships one makes in the military.
In my late 20s when I first married, I had an established career and established best friends and, in my arrogance, could not imagine that these new military spouses, men and women whom I didn’t know, would have anything in common with me anyway.
And while I loved the idea of moving across the country, perhaps a few times during my husband’s career, the thought of packing up and leaving new and best friends again and again seemed heartbreaking — and almost not worth the effort.
It wasn’t until nearly a year into my marriage that I removed the veil of fear and witnessed the welcoming and warm community that surrounded me… and I realized how foolish I had been all along.
While at the height of labor, it was a new friend of mine, the wife of one of my husband’s coworkers, who drove twenty miles to visit us at the hospital and take our dogs outside as my parents were furiously driving from the Midwest and hadn’t yet arrived. Her presence and her smile were so calming, though I couldn’t fully appreciate it until twenty minutes later when I had the epidural.
It was the same woman who met my colicky daughter and I for lunch, and insisted that she hold her so that I could have a bite of what felt like the first food in 15 years.
When our husbands were out in the field for days, it was another new girlfriend who came over, wine in hand and we cut our hair and watched comedies all night long and laughed until that wine snorted out our noses.
During those nights, we forgot about the occasional loneliness and started embracing something even more wonderful: friendship.
They are the spouses who checked on me during my pregnancy, brought food and secretly emailed my mom when I was alone with the baby to let her know that I was fine, we were fine and everything was going to be OKAY.
This is one of, if not THE, most treasured piece of military life: the friendships that I have made along the way.
They are truly different than any other, between the immediate closeness, the ability to relate to the struggles, the encouragement and the support.
Perhaps is it because they are the few outside our family that can really say to us, ‘Here, let me take that crying baby off your hands,’ and we let them, because we know that at one point they have been there and we know that at one point, we’ll do it for them.
Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t because they can occasionally understand us EVEN BETTER than our spouses, what it is to be on the other side of the line waiting and waiting and waiting some more.
We are standing on that beach in Charleston and we are hugging.
It is a night just like those described in the book that brought me to my husband and that brought me to her. I tell her that I wish that we lived next door to one another and she says she wishes it too and for the first time in my life, my self-deprecation doesn’t take over… and I believe her.
I believe her because I know her character well and I believe her because I have seen, first-hand, examples of military spouses reaching out to others in their community and asking for nothing in return, but friendship.
‘Conroy would love this wouldn’t he?’ she says, noting the author of our favorite book. She is referring to Pat Conroy, our favorite author of our favorite book, whose own mother was a military spouse, he himself a military brat.
I can only look at her and smile, the features on her face so striking highlighted against the shine of the moon. She calls for her son, Jack, and as he runs into her, she whips him up in him a hug.
It just so happened that she and her husband had recently moved to Savannah and my midwestern family was heading south to Charleston for Thanksgiving. Three years of friendship: through heartache and worry, deployments and labor, babies being born, politics and conversations dissected, books shared, and daily life, we were finally going to meet. When we hugged for the first time, it was like meeting a long-lost sister. It felt like something more than a friendship, it felt like home.
I know my story isn’t unique; there are hundreds, maybe thousands of military spouses sharing and making their own bit of a history. As much as I try to define it in words, the relationships we make, particularly those while in the military, are indefinable. For that, I am grateful to occasionally be without words.
Perhaps, then, it isn’t chance that brings us all together. But instead, a little bit of that bizarre whirl of fate in the friendships we make along the way.
