In six years of hindsight, however, life wasn’t all watery eyes and goathead thorns, although they filled our shoe soles. We welcomed a beautiful, happy new baby, and after months (and years) of slowly tearing down boulders from our proverbial roadblock, we began to establish roots: We developed a sense of community and culture and eventually made lifelong friends.
This identity crisis that encompassed me is a familiar feeling for military spouses who leave their comfortable, familiar surroundings in pursuit of theirs or a spouse’s better career, promotion, or family life. Foreign cultures and new duty stations are exciting and fresh but can also be an uncomfortable and harsh reality change.
Here’s the silver lining: It can get better. With help and time, I rebuilt myself from the shatters of emotional blunt force trauma. Losing our identity fragments us and reduces our self to shards of who we once were. We question, we review, we renew, and then we rebuild, one brick at a time. Using the past as a stepping stool for the future, my spouse and I made our most recent PCS move the most successful in our marriage.
