OEF SPOUSE, 14 YEARS MARRIED — What deployment did to me, and what coming home did

We met in 2010. He was Army, just back from his first deployment. We got married eight months later. He deployed again in 2012, then 2014, then 2016. By 2018 he had been gone for three of our seven married years. The deployments were hard but they had a shape. You knew the departure date. You knew the homecoming date. You learned to structure your life around the shape. You ran the household. You did the medical decisions for the kids. You filed the taxes. You knew what you were doing. The hard part was when he came home for good in 2019. He had been gone enough that the household did not have a slot for him anymore — not really. The kids had routines that did not include him. I had decision-making patterns that did not include him. We had to renegotiate everything, and we had to do it while he was also doing his own reentry. Blue Star Families had a local chapter in my city. The spouse support group there had three other women who were in the exact same place. We met every two weeks for a year. We did not solve our marriages in that group. What we did was stop being alone in them. Fourteen years married now. Two kids. We are not okay every day. We are okay most days. That is more than I had a right to expect coming out of the deployment cycle, and I credit the group and the long-term couples therapy we have done for the difference.