Looking Back

I was browsing through twitter earlier today, and through a series of clicks, stumbled upon the twitter account of somebody that used to be a friend, but has since [thankfully] been cut from my life. I started reading what they had written, and it all seemed to negative. So angry. So closed-minded. It was refreshing to be reminded that I had made the right choice by letting this person go.

A comment that they had made prompted me to go back a bit and look at posts I had written around a certain time frame, and I stumbled upon this doozy.  Reading back over it, it all came back to how ANGRY I was when it had been written. I was so fed up with life in general, and that post had been a long time coming from my end. And while it wasn’t THAT long ago that it was written [a mere six months] thing have changed so much since then. And I can honestly say that I am in a much better place as a person than I was then.

Being a military wife is hard work. And I will fight anybody who says otherwise. You try to support your husband the best you can, while trying not to sacrifice some of who you are as a person. I definitely felt like I was sacrificing who I was with the company I was keeping, and so I took the comments that had been left [on that particular post] to heart. They were all people that loved me and cared about me and knowing that I had THEM prompted me to make some changes.

What changed, after writing that post, was that people started getting cut.

There was this fear I had, for a while, of  losing myself in my husband career. Every military wife knows that no matter how often they tell us “you come first,” we know the truth … we come first until the Army [in my case] tells them otherwise. Picking up a soldier from jail at 2 a.m. Midnight jumps. Trainings in the field that keep them away from you. Again. But what do we do? We support them. We kiss them goodbye and tell them to call us when they’ve landed safely in the field. We offer to go with them if they need us. We write little “i love you” notes and hide them in their bags.

But who supports us when they aren’t around? Our friends & family who understand.

Family, for most, will always be there. But what happens when you have friends who won’t support you the way you need support? When I didn’t have that, the fear of losing myself was the greatest. I couldn’t be the worried, frightened wife I REALLY was, because he was deployed, and I needed to keep it together for him. But I had people in my life, who were here, who wanted me to change who I was. Thanks, but  no thanks.

As military wives, we sometimes have to put a lot of things on hold for the sake of our service member. Silencing myself for the sake of argument was daunting. It wasn’t worth the stress in my life. So I said goodbye to some. For others, it was a mutual decision to take a step back from the friendship for the time being, and see where things went in the future. No hard feelings, but, a break. Cutting people loose made me really look at all the company I was keeping, and forced me to branch out. And boy, was it worth it.

I’m glad that the girl from that earlier post, six months ago, is gone. Well … not gone. Just more honest. The people that I have in my life in the here & now are fabulous. FABULOUS. I have the best group of women in my life that I could ever ask for. Some are here in Fayetteville, some are not. We don’t always agree on things, but they love me anyways, and they love me for my differences. They don’t judge. They laugh when I talk about saving trees and animals. And I laugh when they tell me where all five guns are hidden in their house. No judging. Just good times. It’s a breath of fresh air, and with my husband being gone as much as he will be this year, it’s nice to finally — after four years of living here — be in a GOOD place surrounded by fantastic people who support me 100%.