The military has been my life since I was just a teenager, my whole adult life has had an Army influence….I am now 37 years old.
This post is a bit of a download of my current feelings, because I can’t even quite make sense of them myself right now and often writing does help.
I did most things very young; joined the military, went on deployment, lived abroad, got married, had a child…all before I was 21. For various reasons we didn’t have any more children, one being I was really really poorly when I had Madison and in hospital for the majority, we were advised I just wasn’t built for babies!
Now lets fast forward to today and my current reality that is making me feel so uncertain about my future.
My husband has about 18 months of his 22 years left, he has also been given an extra two years which would take him to 24 years service and 3.5 years left for us which would be one more posting maybe two depending how things panned out. So we could be living a very different life in 3.5 years, different to everything we have known for so long.
Our daughter is currently in sixth form so the very real possibility is she will leave home in 18 months time to go off to university to fulfil her dream of being a nurse…my nest will be empty which means that I will have a child at university and still be in my thirties with no smaller children to look after, be dependent on or need me. Just writing that makes my heart hurt, I still have so much love to give, how has she grown up so quickly?
I already feel empty and she’s not even left home yet
There is also the option that my husband could go through the selection process for Late Entry commission and then he could be in the military until his fifties…that’s back to postings every two years. That’s a decision he has to make and one that is also not certain, it’s a selection process that takes time.
Even the very immediate future is feeling uncertain with our current posting finishing in the summer 2020 and no word as yet where that is, it will bring decisions with it as Madison will be mid A levels.
I’ve written so much about uncertainty of deployments and postings but this feels so huge, there’s so many possibles and I can’t squeeze my eyes shut and see what the future holds.
Once again uncertainty is crippling me and clouding my thoughts, my mind is forever trying to imagine what my fate might be for the coming years, my next chapter.
I don’t even know how I feel about being part of the charity if my husband was to not be in the military anymore, would I feel like a fraud?!
Lots of you are at the beginning or mid way through your military journey and it really does go so quickly that before you know it the end of the tunnel is/could be (?!) there and when you have known nothing else as an adult I guess I’m finding it really hard, even harder knowing I can’t influence it as none of it are my decisions to make.
No one has the answers yet, time will tell what my future will end up looking like…this summer and beyond.
