By: Anonymous
Last spring, my husband, son, and I sat happily in a meadow of bluebonnets overlooking Stillhouse Lake, smiling for the camera, trying our best to capture some candid family moments enjoying what we thought to be our last spring in Texas. Over a year later, due to some potential changes in my husband’s army career path, we find ourselves here again amidst the lovely bluebonnets.
We’ve been stationed here at Fort Hood for over three years now, just long enough for the community of friends we’ve made to depart before we do. I used to think this might be the most ideal scenario…being the last of our friends left behind at a duty station to then finally leave a place where most people we knew had already gone ahead of us.
But I’m coming to understand it’s a bit more complicated of an experience than I had anticipated.
The limbo of being left behind is a similar discomfort to being in a new place following a PCS move. However, the difference is that after a PCS you expect to feel lonely for a while. You feel disoriented for a bit, but you have the eagerness of a clean slate ahead–a forward momentum pushing you to new friends and new experiences. PCSing is feeling like the rug was ripped from underneath you, but you had time to brace yourself. Being left behind at a duty station is more like slowly having the rug removed from beneath your feet. The loneliness slowly sneaks in on you, but you don’t realize it until you find yourself stumbling. It sneaks in on the days you least expect it, like the time you’re thirty weeks pregnant and ugly crying for the fifth day in a row for no reason and the only friend you have left is the girl across the street you call when you need a cup of brown sugar or a stick of butter…not a shoulder to cry on.
My husband has always been wonderful at being supportive after a change of station. He is understanding of the fact I have no friends except for him and I’m in need of some extra companionship. But being left behind here at Fort Hood has been a more subtle transition into isolation and my husband hasn’t been as ready to jump in. Some days, I just need him to walk in the door and see the piles of sand in the house and the potato salad smeared on the floor, so he can see that I’m not okay. I need him to come sit beside me on the couch in the evenings and look into my eyes and ask how I’m doing, how my day was, what I need. To the latter question, I’d probably answer adult conversation and a trip to Target alone.
I miss my friends. I miss the people I used to count on day to day.
Being left behind leaves me without the support I used to rely on…a friend to spend long weekday afternoons with in the backyard watching our toddlers eat popsicles and play in the sprinkler, neighbor friends to bump into on walks and at the playground, friends who will show up with meals and flowers and smiles days after we bring our second baby home in a few weeks. I might get a few texts to check in, asking for pictures, inquiring about the birth story, but my community here doesn’t exist anymore. The warmth that once flooded our lives here has moved on and I’m often left feeling like my life and my home has had giant holes punched through it.
The people I do meet these days are usually either new here, or ‘new-ish.’ When they learn we’re moving soon, I can feel the giant invisible red X being marked across my face in their minds. It’s as if we’re at a swimming pool and they’re diving into the water head first just as I’m climbing out and about to dry off. They don’t want to put effort into a friendship with someone they’ll just have to say goodbye to soon. They’re looking for hellos–no more goodbyes for now because they just did too much of that. I, too, find myself resistant to putting energy into friendships that won’t have enough time to grow into anything meaningful by the time we move.
This is just a lonely place to be sometimes.
But while feeling left behind has certainly been hard in ways I hadn’t anticipated, it has also been an experience we’ve tried to embrace as a family. We have a lot of big changes ahead later this year, so it’s been a nice time to focus on the present and enjoy the little moments of the days in the place we won’t call home for much longer. We’ve been mindful to spend our final months here trying to check off some last Texas bucket list items while we still can. We are also thankful to be having our second baby in the familiarity of our home and at the hospital where our first child was born. Another Texan coming soon!
While we may feel left behind, and while we do have to survive for one more long hot Texas summer, we know it is times like this one that make our family stronger. Our family is the unit and circle that exists no matter what friends come in and out of our lives, no matter where we go, and for however long we stay there.
