Military spouses carry the weight of managing things at home, while our servicemembers' can carry out the call to service. Seasoned spouses highlight what they love about military life.
You’ll read messages of gratitude for your endless sacrifice, for managing Murphy’s law with aplomb, and for canceling or postponing a perfectly planned wedding, vacation, or family reunion thanks to a denied leave request or deployment.
If you immediately connect with the words and experiences, there’s a good chance a seasoned spouse wrote the blog or captioned the meme. Without a better saying, they’ve been there and done that, so they know your pain.
Although the age range of a seasoned spouse is debatable, most consider a seasoned spouse someone who has a lot of military experience under their belt, which is easy to come by if your spouse has served during the last 20 years.
Military life guarantees a hard-earned badge of honor sewn on a seasoned spouse’s wardrobe— it’s been a long couple of decades after all—but on Military Spouse Appreciation Day, there’s no need to rehash who’s had it worse. By now, the honorable seasoned spouse knows someone out there certainly has had it far worse than they have.
Instead, let’s flip the script and chat about what seasoned spouses appreciate about military life. You might not like how you’ve had to hone your skills or even love all of your experiences, but you can appreciate where they’ve brought you today.
It takes a lot to break you down these days. Your coping techniques are solid, and you finally get that, yes, eventually, you will replace your lost ID. You know it will be painful because you’ll likely lose it over a holiday weekend, but realize you’ll eventually have a new laminated picture of yourself. You also know that at least one major appliance or car will break during a deployment, and you’re okay with that because you’ve successfully managed disaster before. Basically, you just know that somehow, someway, everything will work out.
Most seasoned spouses have worked an odd collection of jobs or found careers along the way. At this point, at a minimum, you know what you DON’T want to do in the future. That’s a big deal as transition approaches—you’ll cut out job searches and interviews that don’t meet your goals. The same goes for volunteering. After years of the professional volunteer hustle, you’ll focus on the organizations that speak to your heart and spend time there.
We all know that no one joins the military for a lucrative salary, but it's hard to deny that a senior military member’s income makes life a little easier. The same goes for their work experiences and relationships. Now, they may know a few people who can help change an unwanted assignment, help them fix the LES mistakes faster, and better yet, someone who can get that new ID ASAP.
There’s no way you could have gotten this far without your friends’ support. But, you also know your friendships have served specific purposes along the way. For example, seasoned spouses may not continuously keep in touch with the moms and dads from preschool, but you’re thrilled to see holiday cards will certainly reconnect if your paths cross again. So, how many best friends have you had in your life?
Well, sometimes. A seasoned spouse’s first instinct is to take charge and meet the challenge head-on, whether that’s a clogged toilet, an unresponsive landlord, or a 2 a.m. solo parent trip to the ER. But at this point in military spouse life, you know that although you can manage on your own 95% of the time, your friends, family, coworkers, and possibly a mental health professional will bail you out of a tough situation. It takes years to learn this lesson, and sometimes you have to re-learn it, but eventually, it finally sticks—everyone needs help sometimes.
Military spouses, you’ve persevered and even thrived over the years, and we thank you for your dedication and devotion to our collective military family.