Kimber's Five

Lately I have been telling my husband that I feel like a new person. I don't feel like I've grown or that some things are different... I feel like a brand new person. My thought process feels different, I feel differently about nearly everything, and my goals and priorities are different. When I trace back how I ended up here, the last 3 years in Washington state (our previous duty station) keep popping up in my brain. Those years changed me. For a long time, I thought those years defeated me. I didn't feel like I was enough. I felt like all of the goals that I had set for my life were pushed off for another 3 years (which they were). I felt like I couldn't make friends. I felt like people didn't understand me. I felt like my family was too big/too crazy or that maybe they didn't like my kids. I felt like life kept throwing us challenges, some bigger than I ever expected to face. I felt like my depression was going to swallow me and that I wouldn't make it ...

There is one aspect of military spouse life that I do not think that I can ever get used to: isolation. I feel like I make my own memories. That sounds like such a small thing, but as our family has grown and we have moved time after time, I've realized I really hate it. What do I mean make my own memories? Well, my husband is rarely home or with me. Sea duty doesn't mean he's working a 9-5 job when he isn't deployed. Even when he is "home" or "in port" he has schools he has to attend, training to go to, a boat to work on, on and on. He often leaves before the kids and I get up and gets home after they are in bed (sometimes after I am in bed). For awhile, he had literally 2 days off a month and they weren't even on the same weekend. So I'm not making memories with my husband, living day to day life with him. Sharing time with him and sharing the kids with him. I'm usually informing him of our day and showing him pictures and videos. T...

This is the second part to my "Mental health support" post. This one is about what I have done to create an environment for myself that prioritized my mental health. At some point when my mental health was at an all-time low, I thought about all of the things that were bothering me and adding to my depression. I put things in columns: one column was things I can change and the other was things I couldn't change. The list helped me realize that I cannot change all the bad things happening to our family and I can't change how people feel about me. However, I can change the support around me and I can change how I feel about all things that happened. I went home to be with my family and friends during my husband's deployment and to give myself a chance to process the past couple years. Getting myself out of the situation also gave me a chance to think about what I liked about being at home with support and all the ways life was less hard when I wasn't goin...

My husband is in the military and we have moved every 1-3 years for 11 years together. We are in the midst of our 6th military move now and we will live at our next duty station for 3 years. That means that I have had to make adult friends at 5 different duty stations already and I'm about to do it again at a 6th. I have found that my needs for friends has varied as our family has grown and as I have grown. When we first got married and didn't have kids, I wanted friends who were out doing things at night. I liked a fun party and going out. I wanted people to do things with-- dinner parties, outings, even day to day errands. It was just nice hanging out, texting, drinking, and talking about books and hobbies. At our second duty station with one child, I wanted people to meet up with. I kept a Pack'n'Play in my Jeep and I would go to dinner parties, put the baby down to nap in the master bedroom. I liked day trips, playdates, barbecues, farmer's markets on the we...

There have been so many positive changes in my surrounding the past couple weeks and months. We've had new families move in on our street. My kids have so many people their age to play with outside. I made good friends with my neighbors and they are real and genuine people that I can feel a deep connection with-- the type of people that you can see being friends with for a long, long time. I love their whole family and they welcome my entire family with open arms. It's amazing. I love the feel of our street right now. It's the type of place you want to lean back and enjoy, let some roots grow. I have spent the past couple weeks and months saying, "What if it had been like this the whole time we lived here?" For just about the first time since we got here, my physical health hasn't been a problem. I started this duty station with an incredibly bad case of mastitis, swooped into a horrible pregnancy that almost killed me and my daughter, and post-partum co...

We are getting ready to move away from our current duty station. We sold our house and we've bought our next house. We have packers coming here, contractors scheduled there, hotels booked. All of the months and weeks of planning are all finally coming together to now: Go Time. It is always weird to me when I get ready to leave a place. I start looking at things that I took for granted-- and possibly even disliked-- differently. The other morning I was walking up to our house after getting the newspaper and my bare foot stepped on a pebble on our driveway. I bent down to brush it off and heard the birds chirping, the sound of a car starting up the street. I heard my kids screaming at each other inside the house-- probably over who's turn it was to pick a show. I was struck with nostalgia. Our house felt so alive in that moment. Our street radiated familiarity. I could almost smell home, the entire state of Washington, and spring itself. Standing there, I took a mental snapshot...

A thought that keeps bouncing around in my mind lately is how to accept my present circumstances. I feel like I'm chaffing under the yoke of being a military spouse. There are so many aspects of this life that, after 11 years, I am very tired of dealing with. 1. I'm tired of trying to make friends. 2. I'm very tired of meeting great friends just as I'm getting ready to PCS or when they are about to PCS or when they are about to deploy. I want my friendships to last and line up. 3. I'm tired of feeling like my life is on hold. 4. I'm tired of people telling me my life is not on hold and that I just need to make the most of it. 5. I'm tired of having the mentality that I'm only going to live somewhere for 3 years, max, and so when I start reaching the end of that time, I start passing up opportunities or letting my roots grow any deeper because I know I'm about to move from there again. 6. I'm tired of bumping into people that want to...

In my 11 years of marriage, we have moved 5 times and we are a few short months away from moving for a 6th time. The longest we have lived somewhere is just shy of 3 years. Our family has grown from just me and my husband to what we have now-- 5 children, a dog, and a cat. As a woman, a military spouse, and a mother, making friends has been difficult. There are a lot of obstacles to overcome when it comes to making friends. In my years of trying to connect at my husband's duty stations, I have felt that this particular hardship of the military lifestyle is treated as a women's issue.  I say this because the spouse groups are set up to support the female, stay-at-home spouses. The meetings are held during a weekday morning, often include some sort of childcare, and generally are held with coffee and a craft. The spouse groups attached to commands will also do things like bake for the command during weeks with long hours or host Ladies' Nights Out. As our family ...

I have struggled with my role as a military spouse, now more than ever. For a long time I felt like there was something I just "didn't get." It felt like a lot of the seasoned spouses I knew were comfortable in their roles and maybe even enjoyed some of the challenges of being a military spouse. I felt like I needed to hang on, dig deep, and that it would come together and I would figure it out. Tour after tour happened and my life shifted in various ways. I pushed my dreams off for another duty station and yet another, when the time would be "right." I focused on my family because, as a military spouse, we move from duty station to duty station where we do not have a built in support network. Even if we build those support networks at a duty station, there is still a period in time where we have to hustle and line it all up. Doctors, dentists, childcare, schools, preschools, playdates, friend circles, mommy meet-ups, on and on. There is not a line of people w...

"[Women] are taught from their infancy upwards that it is a wrong, ill-tempered, and a misunderstanding of 'woman's mission' (with a great M) if they do not allow themselves willingly to be interrupted at all hours." -Florence Nightingale, from Cassandra In my 11 years of being a stay-at-home spouse, I have received no awards or respect for my job. That's usually when people laugh at me-- when I say job. "Your job ? You stay home all day. With kids. " People have said that to my face. And they mean it. From a young age, I wanted a big family. I mean, a lot of kids. I honestly wanted 10 kids. I still want 10 kids, but I lost my uterus after birthing baby #5 so we are not having anymore. I know there are other ways to have children and we haven't ruled them out, but my body is officially out of commission. I also knew that I wanted to have my kids young. I wanted to start having a big family when I was young-- a newlywed. Not just to g...