There’s a version of this post I wrote in 2021 that reads the way a lot of my early writing did — honest, but surface-level. I was fresh off three years of silence on this blog, trying to sum up everything that had happened and everything I had learned in a tidy list of five things.
I wasn’t ready then to go deeper. I know that now.
Those three years … a PCS from Belgium back to the United States, a global pandemic, a short-notice deployment while the world was shut down, virtual schooling, Murphy’s Law hitting in full effect, and then gearing back up to move overseas again … didn’t just teach me lessons. They cracked me open. They dismantled things I had built my sense of self around and forced me to rebuild from a more honest foundation.
This is the version of that post I should have written then. The one that doesn’t just name the lessons, but actually sits inside them.
1. Military Life Is Tough and Saying So Out Loud Is Not a Betrayal
I used to bite my tongue when I was struggling with that life. There was always someone willing to remind me that I chose it. That I knew what I was signing up for. That loving a service member came with the territory.
What I learned, and what I want to say clearly, is that knowing something is hard before you walk into it doesn’t make it hurt less when you’re in it. You can love someone’s career completely and still grieve every missed holiday. You can be proud of every deployment and still feel the weight of it in ways that don’t have easy words. Those two things are not in conflict.
The year I’m thinking about most was the pandemic deployment. My husband was tasked on short notice to deploy while the rest of the world was locked inside their homes. We had already absorbed the PCS, the uprooting, the kids starting over. And then he was gone. I was managing two children, a household, my own mental health, and a world none of us had a framework for and doing it alone.
What I know now that I didn’t fully know then is that struggling with military life doesn’t mean you’re weak or ungrateful. It means you’re human. And the military spouse community does itself a disservice when we perform resilience instead of actually practicing it. Saying “this is hard” out loud is not a betrayal of the people we love. It is the truth. And the truth, I’ve found, is always the beginning of something better.
2. Mental Health Isn’t Something You Fix, It’s Something You Tend
I have been in treatment for anxiety and PTSD for many years. I know my history. I know my triggers. And I still got leveled by the pandemic.
I want to talk about that, because I think a lot of people who have done a lot of healing work feel a particular shame when something new takes them down anyway. Like they should have been further along. Like all that work should have protected them more.
The panic attacks that started when I had to wear a mask in public were not a failure of my healing. They were my nervous system responding to a world that had suddenly become genuinely unpredictable and threatening, which is exactly what anxiety does. The shame I felt around being triggered by something so widespread, so universal, actually made the anxiety worse. What helped was being able to name what was happening without judgment and return to the tools I already had.
That season reminded me that mental health is not a destination you arrive at. It is ongoing tending, the way a garden requires it. There are seasons where things grow easily and seasons where everything needs more care and intention. The work I had done didn’t disappear. It was the foundation I kept coming back to when things got hard. It just wasn’t a shield.
If you’re in a season right now that’s pulled you under even though you’ve done a lot of work, that’s not failure. That’s the nature of healing. Keep going. If you’re still building your morning routines and daily habits around managing anxiety, I write about that too. My post on building a morning routine for anxiety is a good place to start.
3. Kids Are Resilient But They Need You to Be Present More Than They Need You to Be Perfect
Those three years were hard on my kids in ways I didn’t always have language for in the moment.
My children had to adjust to a new country and a new school. Then to a new country again. Then to a pandemic. Then to their dad being gone. Each one of those things alone would be a lot for a child to absorb. Together, on top of each other, with no real break in between … I won’t pretend that was fine just because we got through it.
What I made a decision to do, somewhere in the middle of all of it, was to stop trying to fix everything and start trying to just be there. I stopped trying to explain away hard feelings and started trying to validate them. I sat on the floor with them. I let them be angry. I let them cry about things that weren’t really about the thing they were crying about. I told them over and over that what they were feeling made sense.
And what happened, slowly, was that they taught me something. They showed me that children are far more capable of absorbing hard truths when they feel safe than we tend to give them credit for. They adapt. They find their footing. They make friends in new places faster than we do. They grieve and move through it in ways that adults often can’t, because adults have years of unprocessed grief slowing them down.
Trust your instincts as a parent. Be honest with your kids in age-appropriate ways. Let them feel what they feel. You don’t have to protect them from every hard thing. You just have to make sure they know they’re not carrying it alone.
4. Boundaries Are an Act of Love, Including Love for Yourself
This is the lesson that has changed my life the most fundamentally, and it is still ongoing work.
I spent a long time believing that setting limits with people I loved was a form of rejection. That saying no was unkind. That putting myself and my family first was selfish. Those beliefs were not ones I formed on my own, they came from a family system that did not model healthy limits, and from a culture that often rewards women, especially military spouses, for endless self-sacrifice.
What I understand now is that the limits I draw around my time, my energy, my peace, and my family are not walls I build to keep people out. They are the structure that allows me to actually show up for the people who matter most. You cannot pour from empty. And you cannot be present for your kids, your spouse, your community, or yourself if you are spending all of your resources maintaining relationships and obligations that are draining you without replenishment.
Those three hard years clarified this for me because the stakes were too high to keep ignoring it. I had to make real choices about where my energy was going. I had to say no to things that felt important but weren’t, in order to protect what actually was. And the limits I set, especially with people and situations that had been sources of harm, made the hardest seasons survivable in a way they otherwise would not have been.
If you’re just starting to do this work, I want you to know it is some of the most uncomfortable and most worthwhile work you will ever do. I write about it in more depth in the Toxic Family & Boundaries section of this blog including the harder pieces about estrangement, forgiveness, and what it costs to keep choosing your own peace when the people around you don’t understand why.
5. You Are Stronger Than You Know … But Strength Isn’t the Same as Toughness
I want to push back a little on the way military spouse culture talks about strength. There’s a quote I’ve seen floating around, something about God choosing the strongest and bravest to be military spouses, and while I understand the sentiment, I’ve come to be a little wary of the way we weaponize resilience in this community.
Because here’s what I’ve noticed: when we tell ourselves we’re the strongest, we can use that narrative to bypass the work of actually processing what we’re going through. We can perform toughness instead of genuinely healing. We can confuse white-knuckling through hard things with actual growth.
What I discovered about myself in those three years was not that I was tougher than I thought. It was that I was more willing to be broken open than I had given myself credit for. I cried more than I expected. I asked for help more than I ever had before. I sat with a therapist and said things out loud that I had kept to myself for years. I was not tough. I was, for the first time in a long time, honest.
That honesty — with myself, with the people I trusted, and eventually on this blog — is what carried me through. Not toughness. Truthfulness.
You are going to get through what you’re in the middle of. Not because you’re invincible, but because you are more capable of growth than you realize, and because getting through hard things (even imperfectly, even messily) is what humans do.
If you’re in the thick of it right now and feeling overwhelmed, I’ve written about that experience too: Overcoming Being Overwhelmed is worth a read if you need somewhere to start.
What I Know Now That I Didn’t Then
I came back to this blog in 2021 thinking I was ready to write again. I was. But I wasn’t yet ready to be as honest as this space deserved or as honest as you deserve from me.
The blog you’re reading now is a different blog than the one I started. The tagline says it all: From Battlefields to Boundaries: Healing, Living, Thriving. That’s not a catchy phrase. That’s the actual arc of my life, and this is where I write about it … the hard parts, the slow parts, the parts I’m still figuring out.
If you’re in a hard season right now, I hope something in this post landed for you. And I hope you’ll stick around.
Drop your thoughts in the comments. I read every one.
NOTE: This post was originally published in April 2021. It has been significantly expanded and updated.
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