The Local Cartel
Here's the thing about my family cartel (Special Happy Birthday shout-out to my dad today), aside from my husband and son, they live halfway across the country. And while I know my family would be on the first flight over if I needed them, sometimes my need isn't big enough to justify a flight. I have needs from chasing my dreams and building a life I love that aren't met as easily by people who live multiple states away. That's why I have my Oklahoma City cartel.
The best part about this cartel is that it is local. These are people that I can be in front of in under an hour, while seeing my family cartel will always require a layover in Dallas or Charlotte. These are people that I can sit with on a daily or weekly basis. And for a lot of them, these are people that have recently joined the trenches of balancing motherhood with other goals, just like me.
The worst part about my Oklahoma City cartel is that living in OKC is a temporary thing. While the nature of my husband's job means that we will likely be back in this area multiple times throughout his career, we will move away, and it is unlikely that we will get any closer to my family. My local cartel will have to be rebuilt over and over. Even if we never moved, we can't say the same for others. The natural flow of life is that people are in and out. Whether they are military or not, we are bound to meet people everywhere who are only in that place temporarily.
I know this can be one of the more complicated aspects of our cartels to build. When I moved to OKC, it was December of 2019. My husband and I had only been married for two months, and we had just moved to an entirely new place after spending six weeks apart for his survival training. So we spent the first few months in Oklahoma unpacking our apartment and living in our newlywed bubble. I planned to wait a few months until my husband was more established in a squadron, and then I would start putting myself out there to meet people. Unfortunately, that plan started smack dab in the middle of March 2020, and we all know what happened then.
It has taken a solid two years for me to build the incredible local community that I have. I don't know that it will take that long at the next base, and I hope it doesn't, now that I have a better idea of establishing adult friendships. The other piece of my waiting plan was that I had no clue how to develop friendships naturally. I was 22 and had primarily relied on school, which I was no longer attending, or people at work, which were mostly one-year-olds at the time, to make my friends. I was very uncomfortable with the idea of just putting myself out there and seeing what happens next. I don't think I'll let that fear stop me at the next base. To be clear, I am quite confident that I will still have that fear, but I just won't let it hold me back nearly as much as I did when we first moved here.
So, even though it took me two years to get here, I have a thriving local cartel that I can lean on and support. This came from a few different sources that I want to share, which will hopefully help you find a community if this is still a struggle. My local cartel came from four primary places: the base spouse's club, churches, deployment, and just saying "yes."
Most bases have a spouses club of some sort. I know this can be pretty hit or miss depending on the base and who is running it at the time. I was lucky that our base had a well-run club with a president who was very accessible. She was actually one of the first people to reach out to me and start a connection. I think it's worth checking out at least a few times, and even if you find out the club itself sucks, you can usually find some good people there that agree with you, which brings me to my church friends. I met one of my closest friends through the small group of a church that I didn't even attend. I just assumed that a mega-church likely had an easily accessible system of groups, and I was right. I never actually attended the church, and I did a lot of church hopping trying to find a community that I agreed with, but regardless of my views on the church, I met some fantastic people along the way.
The most considerable expansion of my cartel, though, came from my husband's deployment. Until this point, I had added one or two people to my life on a very sparse basis. But the deployment brought in a flood of people. Turns out, spending five months with a group in the desert creates some pretty tight bonds; who knew? My husband came home with a community that, through many game nights, I call my own as well. If we aren't out in the workforce on a day-to-day basis or if our job doesn't have us interacting with adults very much, like my job as a nanny, then we don't get the opportunity to develop work friends that can turn into outside of work friends (we all know there's a difference). As much as I never wanted to go through the separations of deployments or TDYs, we did gain so many lasting relationships from them. I don't know that I would willingly trade time with my spouse for friends, but I am grateful that when we go through those experiences, beautiful relationships can come out on the other side.
That being said, I gained a lot of friends during the deployment on the home front side simply because I just said "yes" to almost everything. If I was in town and it involved people, then I was doing my best to be there. I started putting myself out there even more by responding, "Let's grab coffee," when people posted on the spouse's Facebook groups. I said "yes," to every spouse's event. I said "yes," to the squadron's table at the dining-in, even though I barely knew one person attending. I said "yes," when someone invited me to pretty much anything. I can't say that I gained a lot of relationships from any specific method, but the culmination has created a cartel that is invaluable to me. When it comes to strategies for making friends, it's helpful to remember that everything works a little, and nothing works a lot. Everyone that comes into our lives will enter through different accesses and connections, so we cannot expect the same method to work every time. And honestly, if we only ever meet people through the same process, then how diverse can our cartel really become (we'll talk about it another time, but diversity within our cartels will be essential, especially during the "make a plan" stage)?
My local cartel can meet more urgent needs, like when we need someone to watch our son, when I need someone to vent to over coffee or a glass of wine, and when I have something to celebrate. I will have to rebuild my local cartel every time we move, and I will have to rebuild it even when we don't, as our other members move. These people don't leave the cartel simply because we don't live in the same zip code. They just serve in different capacities, and I will also help them in different ways. These people are essential to our success in dream chasing, and I hope you have found a local community that loves, believes in, and supports you. And if you haven't, I hope this gives you some ideas of areas to search so that when we enter the "stick to the plan" stage, we are all well-equipped to achieve.
-SARAH HARTLEY