Change is Inevitable, Growth is Optional
Military spouses know a thing or two about change. Whether it’s a temporary adjustment to a spouse’s TDY or the permanence of a friend’s PCS, change is inevitable, often uncertain but certainly a way of military life.
It’s almost exclusively in hindsight that we’re willing to admit this, but such changes can be good. PCS introduces us to strangers who will one day become a circle of friends we’ll wonder how we ever lived without; moving to a new house forces us to purge clutter and experiment with paint; a new location plants us smack in the center of a new backyard begging for exploration. Change is an opportunity to grow.
As a newly married military spouse, I wasn’t altogether graceful in accepting the rapid-fire changes of military life. The announcement we were moving overseas put me face-to-face with quite an unexpected change. There were heel marks all the way from Tucson and tears rolling down my cheeks when we arrived in Tokyo, but it was (albeit in hindsight) the change of living in another country that awarded me one of my greatest personal accomplishments: driving to the airport.
A simple enough task, yes, made infinitely more complicated by inserting a small-town, American girl into the world’s second-largest city, driving on the left side of roads peppered with signs written in Japanese through a maze of tunnels and expressways and only rudimentary gaijin (foreigner) directions to follow: “when you get to the tunnel with pink tiles, stay in the left lane because it will split without warning. You’ll see a big brown building with a picture of a kitty on it as you come out. Stay left until you see the flashing neon sign …” I picked up a college roommate who had flown in to visit and as we sped through traffic, she told me she couldn’t believe I was driving in that mess. (I couldn’t believe it, either, but I didn’t say anything. I was too busy counting tiles, kitties, and neon to talk.)
After my initiation into military life, my husband and I bought our first house at our next assignment — the one where (hindsight also breeds humor) dropped me off six months pregnant with a 1-year-old and came back four years later to collect us for the next move. The lifestyle change of having a husband constantly deployed forced me to master household skills that were far more reaching than I’d have ever given myself credit to undertake. Tools, for example, became as indispensable to me as my favorite lipstick. I cringe at how I ever survived as a single girl without a cordless drill!
Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned in my ten years as a military spouse is that everything — life included — is temporary and change, therefore, is inevitable. Change can be inconvenient, painful, or bring horrible grief; change can be welcomed, hopeful, or adventurous; change can bring unprecedented opportunity for growth. I’ve emerged through countless changes hand-in-hand with another military spouse. Perhaps she’s already been there and offers experience; perhaps she’s never been there but offers sympathy or help. Either way, our growth is deeply intertwined in the friends we share this journey of change with, the tight bonds of camaraderie for which the military community as a whole is famous for nurturing. We take care of our own.
There are two kinds of military spouses: those who grow to fit into each new assignment and those whose feet still drag in a life left behind or one yet to come. While we will all leave this assignment to Altus changed, most of us will look back on how much we’ve grown from being here. Some extraordinary military spouses — the true powerhouses who gracefully accept this assignment no matter where This Assignment is and make it their own — will have grown from the experience and leave behind others who are changed and have grown just in knowing them.
It isn’t so much to say that I’ve been an officer’s wife for 10 years; the true weight of that statement is measured in how those 10 years have changed me, and how I’ve grown to love and embrace the welcoming sorority of Air Force spouses I’ve fallen into. I owe so much to the extraordinarily graceful, hopeful, faithful, accomplished spouses who have modeled, nurtured, and led my way. It’s these unique bonds of friendship formed while learning life’s lessons, playing games, switching careers, and trying new things that make This Assignment home.