Building The Foundation For OUr Dreams
I want to spend the next couple of weeks discussing the big and small questions of military life. I’m sure some are low on your totem pole of priorities and high for others. These questions all affect the ease with which we can move through military life. Knowing which spot to step on can help us avoid the land mines in our path.
Being a new military spouse is incredibly overwhelming. We are often figuring things out at the same time as our service members. This life is totally different from the “real world” and then we mix acronyms galore on top of it. I had zero experience with the military when I met my husband. I knew of people who had served but didn’t know anything about their experiences. They became a lifeline once I became a military spouse, but I didn’t have the answers going in.
I would argue that everyone is new to being a military spouse, though. Even if you grew up as a military brat, you may not be prepared for the ins and outs of spousehood. There may be different branches, ranks, or missions involved in this life. I imagine it is a different experience to send a spouse off to war than to send a parent. Even if it’s all still the same level of hard, the hards are different, meaning we need new skills to navigate.
Take my husband for example. His parents both served in the Air Force. My mother-in-law did six years to pay for school, and my father-in-law served twenty-plus years. But here’s the interesting part: they moved twice in my husband’s life, and his father was never gone for more than a month. It’s a crazy example of military life that rarely matches anyone else’s experience. They moved once when my husband was 1.5 years old and then again when he was in middle school after his dad had officially retired. Those years in between the moves were spent in the town my father-in-law grew up in, which meant cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents were right around the corner more often than not.
Being a child of a military family is different from being a service member or spouse. The struggles come into focus much more, but we also discover new hardships that we must battle. No two people are the same, and no two careers are the same. Each difference brings new questions we may not have been prepared to answer. So I want to talk about all of those.
How does this relate to dreaming, though? Of course, my goal is to keep the main thing the main thing, which means dreams should be at the forefront of our conversations. But it all comes back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If you remember from back in school, the five levels are physiological, safety, love and belonging (social), esteem, and self-actualization. If you don’t have the first level, then it is tough to get the second, and so on. Building the pyramid with only a few pieces can leave us off balance.
Military life is designed to disrupt these levels. Hopefully, we all have our physiological needs met, but I know many military families struggle with food insecurity. Safety needs include employment, which can be hard to find and maintain as a military spouse. It also includes our personal safety, which can feel hard to find when we are constantly in new places. The social levels are torn down whenever we find ourselves at a new duty station or going through a separation. Without those foundational pieces, developing our self-esteem and pursuing self-actualization can be very hard.
That self-actualization piece is where we find and achieve our dreams. But without the foundation, we have nothing to build our dreams on. And we don’t have the room for error we need when pursuing something as wild as a dream. That’s why I want to build the foundation. I want to answer the questions that ease the path of military life because that is how we can chase our dreams without letting military life be anything more than a detour along the way.