Thanksgiving is a time to reflect and be grateful for the rich blessing in our lives. This Thanksgiving season, there is one thing that has been on my mind time and again that I would like to share with all of you. I come from a large Italian family whom I adore and love deeply. They are loud, opinionated, stubborn, loyal, rich in love, kind to a fault, and one of the greatest gifts of my life. I have Jason’s family that I love like my own, and who have all been such a gift and shown us unconditional love for many years.
I have also been blessed with the best lifetime friends from my childhood that have walked with me through good and bad times, who never fail to amaze me with the efforts they will make to be there for me through thick and thin. But, there is another part of my world that has greatly influenced who I am. The military community is unlike any other in the world but, they are little talked about in the blogosphere or media. This community is vital to the survival of military families. I would like to spend a little time sharing my stories about a few women who are unsung heroes, and a large part of my military family.
Twenty years ago, on November 11, 1998, Veteran’s Day, I sat and watched as my husband was sworn in as an enlisted member of the active duty Air Force for the following six years. As I sat there eight months pregnant and married less than a year, I was completely naïve about what it meant to be a military spouse. To me, the military represented stable income to support my new little family, and nothing more. Over the next eighteen years, I would learn some of the most important lessons of my life, and many of those lessons would be about friendship and what it means to be a family.
My pregnancy up to that point had not gone as planned. I started dilating when I was six months pregnant and had been on bed rest for months. So, when it was time for Jason’s enlistment, we moved, against doctor’s orders, to Wyoming where I would live with my mom while he was away at boot camp. In my mind, he would go to boot camp for a couple months, he would come home, we would have a baby, and then move to a military base and we would start a new life as a military family. But no, boot camp, I would learn, was just the beginning of the separation. He did go to boot camp for a couple of months. He flew home on Christmas Eve, and we had a baby the day after Christmas, a fat and delightful little chap named Jordan. Then, three days later, Jason left again to continue his training for four and a half months, and I stayed with my mom to take care of our son. We spent half of our first year of marriage living in different states and I thought that was going to be the worst of it. But, in April he got his first assignment…to Germany. It was then that I got the first real taste of what it actually meant to be a military family. In May of 1999, just days before our first wedding anniversary, I packed up my deliciously sweet baby and everything I could squeeze into suitcases to leave behind all my family and friends and move across the ocean where I would start a life overseas that I never wanted or planned for. This was my welcome to the military life!
For the longest time, I was homesick every day and wished I knew the way to the airport so I could go home. There was no Google Maps or GPS devices in 1999. If you didn’t have a map or know the way, you simply weren’t going. My best friend was my chubby little blue-eyed baby boy, whom I adored. Jason worked 12-hour shifts, often for more than a week at a time without a day off, and almost always the night shift, which meant that he was asleep all day…every day…and I was alone. I looked for playgroups, socialized with women from my church, and learned a lot about being a military spouse in those early days.
Then, after about nine months, I woke up and realized I wasn’t sad anymore. No, I woke up excited to get out and explore this amazing country I lived in! I spent the next three years traveling Europe and seeing everything I could see while I was there. I also started to make friends and attended a weekly scrapbooking group where all the moms would scrapbook and chat while the kids ran around and played. This is where I would meet one of my very best friends, Melanie.
Two years after moving to Germany, my family grew by one with the addition of a dreamy, blue-eyed girl, named Elaine. Jason still worked nights and was rarely around, even when he wasn’t flying out to other places to work, but I was no longer alone. I had great friends and recognized for the first time the meaning of military family. We did everything together. Every holiday, every birthday, shopping adventures by train, weekly gatherings, going to the gym, Sunday dinners, Seidler tournaments (a strategy game known as Settlers of Catan in the US), game nights, dinner parties, babysitting each other’s children…all of it. No matter what life threw at us, we had each other, and we took care of each other because we were the only family any of us had to rely on.
Koln, GE 2002
Shortly after Elaine was born, Jordan was diagnosed with Autism and my world changed forever. I not so lovingly refer to this time of my life as the “dark period”. Of all the things I have been handed over the years, this was a foundation shift that I was not prepared for and simply could not find it within myself to accept with grace. Perhaps because it was the first time I had been given something of this magnitude, or maybe a lack of maturity because I was still so young at just twenty-five, I’m not sure. But I know that I have never before, or since, felt the hopelessness I felt during that period of time. To me, it was as if I had lost my child…the child I had dreamed of, and I had no idea what the future would look like for him. I grieved deeply for the loss of the child I thought he would be, and it took another move across the ocean for me to be able to gain perspective, wholeheartedly accept the child that he was, and realize that he was the person he was always meant to be. I look back on those feelings of loss and feel ashamed of my ignorance and short-sightedness. Most of all, I am proud of the man that Jordan has grown into, and I feel honored to be his mother.
To my surprise, many of my friends stuck by my side during my time of ridiculousness…I still don’t understand why, but I am so grateful. I truly had the very best friends anyone ever could have asked for. Thankfully, due in large part to social media, I still keep in contact with many of them on a regular basis. But most especially, Melanie. She was the one who, no matter the craziness in my house, was always there. She was the only person who loved my son the way I loved him and would volunteer to babysit and care for him whenever I needed. She listened through all of my nonsense and shared in my darkness, never judging, loving me and my family through it all. She was exactly the person I needed in my life at that time, and still today, she listens without judgment and loves without qualification. As her family has grown exponentially over the years, her children are still like my own and mine are like hers, because we are no longer friends, we are a family. The spring before we left Missouri, her family relocated with the military to Illinois. We helped them move into their beautiful home, squeezed the babies old and new, reminisced, and enjoyed dinner just like old times. Easter that year felt like a homecoming, it was remarkable how much our families had grown and changed, at yet, we all loved and laughed as though we had been together all along…as a family.
We left Germany and were relocated to North Carolina in 2003, where we could get better services for Jordan. I immediately went to Family Advocacy and started looking for a new support network. This time it wasn’t in playgroups or at church. I needed a way into the Autism community because I knew I needed help. The lady at the front desk told me there were a group of women who all had children with Autism that knew everything there was to know about the services offered in that area and she gave me a name and phone number. When Tiffany answered the phone that day long ago, I could never have guessed she would be the answer to so many of my prayers, my lifeline to save me from drowning in a life I didn’t understand and wasn’t ready to accept, and my best friend. Both of our husbands worked nights so we would talk on the phone for hours every night while we cleaned our houses and researched autism, found online autism resources, and shared every detail of our lives. Our families did everything together. We attended autism conferences together, shared birthdays and holidays, and became the best Siedler foursome the world has ever known. She was there with me when I gave birth to my third baby, another sweet blue-eyed gift, named Clara. She was there two years later when Clara was diagnosed with leukemia while Jason was deployed to Iraq. His command in Las Vegas had tried without success to contact Jason all day, but no one could tell them where he was. Tiffany was able to contact her then-husband, who was deployed to Afghanistan, to let him know what was happening and he was the one who tracked Jason down and told him to call home. Fourteen years after that first phone call, it was Tiffany who would fly across the country to be with me when my husband died…because, as always, she was there, just when I needed her most, over and over. She was my friend, but she became my sister, and her family became my family during those two years living in North Carolina and forever after.
Exploring Colorado
Shortly after Clara was born, Jason cross-trained into engineering and my family relocated to Las Vegas after he completed his training in 2005. Jason’s family had lived in Vegas for years and that is where we lived when we were first married. This was the first time we did not have a strong connection to our military family and it was the first time I realized how different our life was from the civilian world. In 2007 Clara was diagnosed with leukemia at just two years old. Once again, our world was turned upside down, but this time, I was prepared. I knew that no diagnosis was the end of who we were as a family. I had accepted that our family was ever evolving, and change was the one constant in life that had become my friend. But cancer, unlike autism, threatened to take my child away from me completely. Not the child I dreamed of, or the person she may become, but my living, breathing, beautiful baby girl. There is no fear that shakes your soul like standing over your child in the ICU praying for every breath, not knowing if they will survive the night, let alone the following months of hell that crashed down on our family like a tsunami. My perspective and respect for the fragility of life shifted, and my life would never be what it was before. During this time, our families rallied around us with love and support, and we had several very good families from our church that supported us, cared of us, and became our friends during our time of need. But it wasn’t until we moved on base and lived in military housing that I met Heather. When I met her, I wanted to hug her and ask her where she had been all these years?? Through Jason’s next deployment, Heather was an angel at my side. She taught me about faith, perseverance, and patience through her own life and experiences. She always made me laugh and encouraged me to do silly things like make Harry Potter references from the pulpit at church…challenge accepted! Some of the very happiest times of my life came after Jason returned from that deployment, and Heather was by my side with her beautiful family through it all. But, we didn’t have each other nearly long enough. We moved away a short year and a half after we found each other. I felt then as I feel now…we were robbed! We live too far apart and see each other far less than we should, but she is still as dear a friend as there ever was, and we are connected by more than circumstances or geography, she is forever part of who I am. It doesn’t matter how much time passes, we pick up like there hasn’t been a single day that has passed since when we are together…she’s one of the best humans ever made!
After six years in Las Vegas, in 2011, it was time to move on again. This time we landed in Missouri. We moved into an area that was heavily military, but mostly Army. They loved to tease us about being in the “Chair Force”, but despite our different branches, our lives were much the same. Long deployments, months-long training in other states, and military spouses who stayed behind faithfully taking care of children, homes, and finances, holding everything together in a way that only a military spouse can understand. They, too, dealt with the aftermath of deployments, active duty spouses who belonged first and foremost to the US Government, and served quietly, with honor, behind the scenes, never receiving recognition or awards for their sacrifices. It was in Missouri that I learned to love and respect my job as a military spouse and to find honor in my role, because of the wonderful example of Nadine, a sweet lady that I knew would be a cherished friend the day we met. She was as fierce as she was tiny, but had a heart made of gold and a life comprised of service. Service to her community, her church, her family, and her country. We were both parents of teenagers and gone were the days of hanging out and being besties, instead, we enjoyed long lunches during stolen hours on school days, where we shared all our adventures, counseled each other, and gave each other the support we so needed. She was my rock in a place and time when so much of my world felt like shifting sand beneath my feet. There were so many families that became our cherished friends and supported us in our new journey raising teenagers, making a time in our lives that was so tumultuous into a time when we felt so loved. Four years came and went quickly and too soon it was time to go. Though I had no indication as we pulled away from our beautiful home and onto the highway the day we moved, I had made my last military friend and I was leaving a very important chapter of my life behind in that tiny little town, lost in the woods of Missouri.
Despite the odds stacked against us, we were granted our number one pick, a station in Denver, Colorado. Jason and I both grew up in the Rocky Mountains. Most of our family still lives in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado, so it just made sense to go home and be closer to them as Jason was nearing the end of his military service. It was great to be a short six-hour drive from most everyone, rather than twelve, sixteen, or thirty-six hours like it had been for most of Jason’s career. We bought a house many miles from the base because housing was almost impossible to find or afford any closer. Outside of Jason’s work, we really didn’t have any contact with the military or other military families. It was very lonely, and I felt like I was missing part of what made our other duty stations bearable and even happy places for me to live. We made other friends, but our life was vastly different from theirs, even to the point where they just couldn’t understand why we would be in the military. It was a stark contrast to living in Missouri, which made the adjustment difficult for all of us. Even though I didn’t have my military friends at my side, I still relied on them for support and they were always only a phone call away.
When Jason died in August of 2017, our military family traveled across the country to be with us. Those that couldn’t be here all called and shared their condolences and wished they could be here with us in our time of need. There is no time or distance that changes friendships in the military. Our community is one that knows what family truly means. So even though I am no longer a military spouse, and most of my military friends are either retired or separated from the military, the bonds that were built during our time of service transcend rank or status and hold us together as strongly as ever.
So, since it is still November, and not strictly Christmastime yet, I want to say thank you to my military family. Those who know first hand what it means when someone talks about the sacrifices of our military men and women. Those who have experienced first hand what it is like to uproot their families every few years and start over in a new place. Those who know that families are built by more than DNA and biology. Those who understand what if feels like to have pieces of your heart spread out around the world and truly understand that love and friendship are not about convenience or geography, they are the bonds that hold human beings together in times of joy, sorrow, and life’s biggest challenges. This, is the military family. I would not be who I am today without them, and I am forever grateful for the role each of them played in my life. As a young girl, growing up in a tiny town in Wyoming, it was highly unlikely that I would travel the world and be so richly blessed with family from so many diverse places and backgrounds, for that I am truly grateful!