Rick retires next year after twenty-two years of service to the empire. We're planning our own move, but it's heavier somehow. 8 people, 6 pets, buying a home, transitioning to a new non-military identity and way of life...If we make a mistake, the army isn't going to be there to whisk us away in a couple of years or catch us if everything falls to hell. We'll bear the responsibility and successes and failures on our own. After two decades of Uncle Sam running our lives, that agency is a little overwhelming. There won't even be time to adjust--we'll have to hit the ground running, getting kids into extracurriculars and teaching one to drive (two, since the permit age is lower), getting work and reintegrating into a community we haven't been a part of for years.
On the other hand, orders to Guam are an adventure. A challenging one, certainly. That kind of isolation is no joke. The cost of living, typhoons, the pace of life on a relatively small island...there are definitely going to be some major hurdles. And yet I think about when my kids were younger, how exciting it was to pack up the car and just drive to the next duty station, unsure of what we'd find, and I miss it. Now there are a thousand different concerns. Friendships mean more to teens than toddlers. There's more paperwork. A ridiculous number of pets to be accounted for. And lurking behind it all is the little voice saying, "You could just stay where you are, you know."
There are good reasons to stay here. Rick has a job he could step into without any hassle. The house is already bought and largely renovated. The kids have friends. More importantly, WE have friends. We know the roads. The cost of living is cheaper even if property taxes are absurd. It makes financial sense to stay. Despite this, even though we finally have the chance to put down real roots, none of us want to stay here. It simply doesn't fit.
I've been happy in so many places. I've been happy here, too, though it took some effort. Still, it feels like a secondhand shoe--it doesn't hurt, it's roughly the right size, it's a perfectly serviceable shoe, but something about it just isn't right. Sometimes in my more cynical moments, I doubt that there is ever a place that will be "just right." I'm not Goldilocks and there isn't a cottage in sight. What I do know is that here isn't where our story seems to end.
And so next summer we're going off on a grand adventure of our own. It feels like the last one, a finality, but in reality it's only another change. I just have to remember all the changes I've already survived. I got married and had kids and it was so much better than I expected. Ten moves to wildly different locations. Sickness. Grief. I've been a young mother, a middling mother, and now the mother of adults, and each stage has had its unique trials and joys. I don't regret any of it. Whatever comes next will also undoubtedly come with good times that outweigh the bad.
I'd be lying, though, if I said I wasn't intimidated at the sheer amount of chaos ahead. It's kind of like the climactic scene at the end of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy: multiple ships firing at each other as they ride the edge of a swirling vortex of death, it's raining for dramatic effect and everyone's drenched, no one is 100% sure what is actually going on or what anyone else is doing, and for good measure there's a wedding thrown in just to keep things interesting. It's all you can do to stay on your feet. That's how 2026 is shaping up. Orders and out-processing in a behemoth bureaucracy that makes the simplest tasks require three different signatures and a 100 different pieces of paperwork; prepping and selling a house; buying a house 3,000 miles away; getting one kid across the graduation line, another four kept to grade level, and the oldest finishing her junior year of college; bouncing between last-hurrah activities with the girls before we rip them away from their friends again; packing and passports and paperwork so that our circus can legally cross Canada...That's before we even think about the wedding that might be happening somewhere in the middle of it all.
To quote another movie, "I'm too old for this sh*t."
But I remember driving to D.C. in a jankety car and no phone. That was intimidating too, but we survived. We survived the first epic southern rainstorm where we couldn't see 10 feet in front of our car, and the first snow that shut down a highway and turned a 10-hour trip into a 20-hour nightmare. We've made it through car engines melting outside of Dallas and babies starting a domino-chain of vomiting half-way through the midwest. Heck, we even handled international travel during Covid. It wasn't fun, but we got some good stories. In the end that's what we'll remember, and that's what I'm depending on. We didn't come this far to sink now.
Now I just need to remember that when the winds start howling.
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