For those of you with a military move on the horizon, here’s 54 quick and easy steps to get you on your way. Listen to spouse spend 1-11 months talking with certainty about things the Chain of Command or Career Manager have told him regarding his posting. Resign yourself that a move this year is likely. Start half-ass ‘decluttering’. Plan for a garage sale you won’t have time to ever put on. Come up with smart ass response to the questions “where are you moving?” and “when are you moving?” before they drive you insane. Realize you never did put back the baseboards you took when you put in the floors. Hastily put them on. Realize your walls need painting first. Paint all the walls. Realize you probably only need 6 hours sleep a night. Start to panic early March – Mid April when no Posting Message has been received. Listen to spouse spend 1-6 weeks talking with certainty about things the Chain of Command or Career Manager have told him regarding the ‘for sure coming any day now’ message. Say goodbye to spouse for deployment/course/exercise. Receive posting message next day. For entirely different location than discussed. Register with Brookfield. Get lulled into a false sense of hope that it was not that hard to log in online. Contact Realtor. Find Power of Attorney at the bottom of a drawer. Find a price point somewhere between “I need this to sell quickly” and “I need to afford to buy a house when I sell this“. List the house. Meet with Brookfield. Check off everything you want them to tell you about like you know how this is going…
Usually when I’m asked to speak somewhere or write something, it’s to give insight into the lives of Canadian Forces families to a culture that doesn’t know a whole lot about them. Or what they do know, they see on the news or on Lifetime, a jaded, spun and less than realistic portrayal of a life. Many many days, the military plays very little role in my day to day activities. I get up, I go to a gym in my (civilian) community. I get my kids off to (a civilian run) school. I go to work. I happen to work on the base part time, so that part is a little skewed. But then I come home. I take my kids to Jiu Jitsu at another off base gym. I clean up and watch Netflix. I start over. So while the undertones of my life have been set by my spouse’s employment (I live where we were told, not where we choose. I sleep alone though I’ve been married 14 years), for those mundane daily activities we’re not any different. We’re average. My spouse, though in a combat trade and on his 4th deployment, has never been wounded, emotionally or physically. We walk through life like everyone else. Except we don’t. Not always. And there are times of year where the military stops being one of those quiet sideline participants and starts screaming for center stage like a tantrum throwing toddler. That’s the season of life we are in now. And I could yell from the rooftops that the military is ‘just a…
