My whole life, my family has been tied to the military, making almost no independent decisions for ourselves. Every aspect of our lives depended solely on my dad’s work: where they needed him and what job spaces needed to be filled. A lot of the time, he wasn’t around, working from before I got up to getting home when I was already asleep.

I learned a lot from the deployments, and I grew up differently than the people around me. I was more mature than most of my friends and sometimes found it hard to connect to people. Because I was moving a lot, sometimes, when I found those people, I had to leave them and start all over again. Eventually, I got used to it, but that didn’t make it any easier. I couldn’t wait for the day when I finally would settle somewhere, which ended up being New Hampshire. When we moved there, I didn’t have any friends. We reconnected with some old homeschooled friends and hung out with them every week. But we grew apart once we got older, all going our separate ways, which started happening when most of us started school for the first time.

School was just one of the changes that came from the military. I was homeschooled every grade until the end of 5th grade because we saw it as the easiest and best option for me to learn. The best option, that is, until my dad got orders to deploy again. It was his third and last deployment, for six months, to Pakistan. That day we got the news, my world felt like it was collapsing. Just when my mom had gotten a great position at work, my dad was leaving again. Now, with her at a full-time teaching job and my dad going to another country, it left me home alone most days. The only option we saw left for me was to go to school. Even when I was younger, I had said that “never in my life” I’d go to school, but now I was basically forced to go. Luckily, we found a great school community that I felt at home in and loved. But the best part was that the fear of the chance of us leaving again was no longer there.

The day my dad came home marked the end of our military journey. After 20 years of being apart on and off, we were finally reunited. Even though it was very difficult, I got so many benefits out of it. I got closer to my mom, and now that my dad is home, the time with him is even more valuable. Throughout my whole life, I had to make a lot of decisions for myself and had to do a lot more for myself. Most times, it was very difficult, but instead of seeing those things as a negative, I was taught to see them as a positive. Find those people who will support you, and you can really talk to without feeling disconnected. I also got more resilient through this; I learned to bounce back from those really tough times and get something good out of it. Overall, this journey made me the person I am today, impacting my personality and life in so many different ways, all of which I am so grateful for.

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