When divorce happens, a military spouse’s entire world gets crumpled and tossed aside for a new one. We’ve reinvented ourselves for years only to find out we weren’t done; and, this time, it is without any of the safety nets we had available to us before…. We are the outsiders. There must be something “wrong with us” for this to happen. It is almost as if the system and society wants us to crawl into the corner, willing to take what is thrown at us; the ultimate of uncertain futures. Everything “they” believed about us before, the image of the supportive military spouse, is obliterated in seconds.
We cringe when our friends post memes about how marriage shouldn’t be disposable and how people should fight rather than give up. Or the message that “we just didn’t try hard enough.” Isn’t that the constant undertone of military life? Trust me. No one strives to give up. And, if anything, military spouses cling harder to our military marriages. Who would give up all we have given up already, only to walk away? Forget that, for a lot of us, the decision wasn’t ours…
For those of us who stood on the sidelines accepting the “…and I want to thank my wife…” for decades only to be one day be told, “thanks but I’m good now” or that there is something or someone more important than you, there is even more of a sting. And for our military kids, who trailed behind us, the thought of being away from their service member parent seems unbelievable after years and years of being apart so much.
Some days, I wish I could easily unpack the reasons why I am in the situation I am in – but it is too complex. I could blame it on the separations. I could blame it on the military. I could blame it on something I did. I could blame it on something he did. But no matter the reasons why, the result is the same: We are no longer a part of a community that was just as much ours as it was his… and it is a burden that I never knew existed.
These days, I try to not think of the past as much as I try to think about the future. But it is a future I never planned for, and for which I was not prepared. No one told me the reason I should find employment was because I might be on my own one day. The military always meant not having to worry about health insurance but now I do. Our life meant that I didn’t have a home where I could live with my kids. The embarrassment of military divorce is often the final weight that I unload each day. And I worry that my children also carry the same with them.
This is a sadness that I never knew existed. I apologize to every military spouse who walked this path before me. It is more than I ever knew from deployments, or moving away from friends, or temporary separations. It is a sadness of losing my best friend. It is the sadness of my children not seeing their parents together. It is the sadness of a life lost, the life I envisioned when I sacrificed so much to get there…
And there is another feeling… being scared. Scared of truly going it alone. Of the reality (yes, it is a reality) of losing our financial security and benefits at a time in my life when we cannot be without it. The scariness of raising my kids within such sadness keeps me awake at night. Then there is the profound loss of friendships that flounder under the weight of my sadness and unfamiliar territory. They think it could never happen to them; maybe they even think being with me makes them vulnerable to the same.
I try to focus on the very faint glimmers I see ahead because, honestly, that is all they are right now… of the friendships that got underneath me and lifted me up. The women who cried with me over the phone even though they could never imagine. The family that gave me legs when I had none. The children who hugged, and held me tight, as we ran toward a new life knowing nothing of what was ahead…
We are no longer the adored military family. We are no longer told how brave we are or thanked for how much we gave up for our service member, our military, our country. We are truly the forgotten. The military spouses and children who gave all to only discover there is a world that is scarier, harder, and lonelier than what we had ever experienced before… Everyone thinks they know our story. No one truly knows our story. I used to be weary… I never truly knew weary…
To the divorced military spouse who is reading this … I see you … I know you won’t hit “like” for fear of what people will think. I wish I could hug you like I would have done years ago, in my military life. It was a hug from another military spouse saying, “you can do this…” And I mean it more than ever, not just for you, but for me. We have to do this… and we have to take everything we learned during our milspouse life, the strength, the courage, and put it towards ourselves, our children, and our new future.
