Every year thousands of military families will embark on a PCS to a new location. Sometimes it is a fun adventure, sometimes it is to a place where you are already counting down your days to leave before you even arrive.
One thing that military families have become great at is knowing how to PCS. We can PCS purge like Marie Kondo, we can 3D Tetris pack boxes with the best of them, and we can put together a home like Chip and Joanna Gaines. But eventually you will find yourself feeling the PCS burnout.
The PCS burnout can happen any time. Sometimes we feel it after our 3rd or 4th PCS. Sometimes we do not feel it until the 11th or 12th PCS. Other times we feel it like a rollercoaster when the burnout comes and goes at different stages of our spouse’s military career. We think it may just be the stress of another move, but in truth it is us feeling out of gas and wanting to be done. Regardless of when we feel this overwhelming desire to just throw in the towel or burn it all down, it happens and it sucks.
There are times when it feels like a slow build up to the burnout, and other times it’s like a switch was flipped. We feel this resentment of our friends who have not had to move around the country. They get to have the stability of a single location that we can only dream of. The constant of the same school district for their children while we uproot ours to start their 5th new school in as many years. It’s their ability to live near family and easily have grandparents come lend a helping hand while someone may be sick, or a spouse is out of town on a work trip. The knowing they have put roots down someplace and making it a long-term home for their family.
But for us, it is a quite different story. We pack up our home every 2 to 3 years to move to some unknown location to start life over for the umpteenth time. Our kids will start their 4th school district, we will find a new provider, and new coaches for their extracurricular activities. We will relearn the grocery store and the preferred restaurants while trying to find the new hidden gems. And then we hit that wall.
We either found a place we love and never want to leave and do not want to even think about moving away. We become tired of the cardboard boxes and hotel rooms, while we drive across the country and having to fathom handling another claim on more broken furniture.
Or we found that place that we absolutely hated and cannot wait to leave. But instead of going to the next assignment we long to head home and settle down with our friends. The dream that my best friends’ children would be best friends with mine.
You just want to be done. You are tired and burned out. You want to find that forever home, and truly settle in without ever having to purge again. You want to never have to measure and buy new curtains or match paint colors again. Whatever dents or colors your children put on the wall would be just fine.
But like all the other years before this, we will pack up our home and follow the service member we love on our next great adventure…