A Message to Military Wives Everywhere

I'm 21 years old. I got married as a sophomore in college to my high school sweetheart. When I got married to Bill, I thought I knew what I was getting into. He told me what being a military wife meant. It meant I had to be flexible, schedules and plans can change at any given moment. It meant I had to be understanding, Bill wouldn't be able to tell me everything about his day, he would be stressed out because his day was complete mayhem and I wouldn't always be able to understand the choices his superiors made for him. I had to be strong, for all the times my husband wouldn't be and needed an arm to hold him up, a voice to tell him how proud I was of him. Friday was that day. And it's when I realized what it truly meant to be a military wife.

I watched as my husband, my best friend, sailed away on a ship Friday morning. I knew it was going to be emotional, painful, heart-wrenching and a million other things. But what no one can prepare you for is coming home after the hard goodbye. You see their car in the driveway, empty and silent. You see their shoes and boots in front of the door, their sweatshirts in the closet, the last plate they ate off of and the last cup they drank out of lying in the sink. You walk upstairs to find the bed unmade from the last time you slept in it together and the form of their head still engraved on the pillow. The hardest thing to face, the pain that no one talks about or can prepare you for, is seeing the one you love's belongings all over the house and knowing that he's not home, that he's not coming back in only a couple weeks. He's gone for deployment, and you somehow have to find the courage to still live your married life alone. Finding it inside yourself to wake up every morning, get dressed, eat meals, and for the sake of everyone else, take a shower. I woke up this morning clutching Bill's TCY Rowing sweatshirt, breathing in his smell, dried tears still evident on my cheeks, and my cats at my sides looking at me as if to ask, "what are you going to do?"

I'm going to get up.

I'm 21 years old. I'm a wife, a college student, a mother of two cats, a friend, a daughter, an aunt, a sister and a million other things. As much as I wished for my world to stop the minute I let go of my husband's hand, I knew I had to go on. The minute the tears began to flow uncontrollably from my eyes, the minute the ship left the harbor, I wanted to world to stop. I wanted a week, just a week, to sit in front of my television and cry into a tub of ice cream. I just wanted it all to stop for only a minute. But, you see, being a military wife isn't just about being flexible, understanding, supportive and strong. It's about finding the will to keep going as the world keeps spinning, even when you start to get dizzy. Sometimes the world spins too fast and we fall. I fell at the foot of my bed and cried my eyes out, hoping that when I opened my eyes, Bill would be standing there. But I knew he wouldn't. And I knew I still had to get up.

We have to get up.

We have to get up for our husbands. The most important thing for them is that we are OK. They want to know that we can, and will, take care of ourselves. That we will eat, shower, get dressed, go to work or school, see our friends and family and get off the floor. We have to wipe the tears from our eyes and live. Because our men will come back and we want to be able to tell them we grew, that we got stronger and learned to be brave, that we honored their sacrifice with our own bravery to face the world when we wanted to stay in bed. We want to be able to say to them:

I got up.