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May 20, 2007

There are many benefits to being a military spouse.

There's travel enough to fuel anyone's love of adventure, and best friends for life to be found on every new assignment. There are new and fun discoveries to be made in cities and towns across the globe, and there is always justification for lots of shopping every time you arrive someplace new.

But one of the worst things about being a military spouse is saying goodbye.

Sometimes it seems like your time as a military wife can be measured in the farewells you partake in. Seasons can be recalled by whom you bid adieu to each month, and years blend according to who left and who arrived.

Some of my dearest friends are getting ready to leave in the next few days and weeks.

They are moving to states and countries that span thousands of miles apart. They are leaving what has been familiar to them for the past few years to go someplace where they probably know no one.

And there's one who is going to Hawaii who I have decided is my new BFF because she said she welcomes visitors. I just need to ask if she also welcomes said visitors' children.

It seems odd to recall that these women were not a part of my life in any way, shape or form just 24 months ago. Two years ago, I had never met them, never heard of them, and had no idea how they would touch my life and the lives of those around them.

Now, I will never forget them.

There's the woman who could be counted on to make me laugh hysterically as we would burn up cell minutes talking about pretty much absolutely nothing.

There's the girlfriend who's husband insisted we only talk after both sets of our kids were in bed due to the fact that the amount of time we spent engaged in each others lives made us oblivious to all else. Well, that and the bottle of white zinfandel that always ended up with us.

There's the woman who I depended on for advice almost every week whenever I was confronted with new and foreign situations. This woman I could call pretty much any time of day or night to ask for opinions, as she assured me she was always awake. To this day, I have my doubts about whether she sleeps like most humans. If she is a creature of the night, she is one of the nicest and cutest ones I've met.

And there are so many others: the woman who would watch my children whenever emergencies overtook my life, the girlfriend who assured me I was obviously losing the baby weight every day (to whom I am truly grateful for lying to my face), and the lady who would let me tear-up on her shoulder and she on mine over the state of our deployed husbands and the constant worry that seemed to envelop everything we did.

All these women will be leaving over the next several weeks.

All these women have touched my life in some way.

All these women will be missed.

There will be others who will take over when they leave, and each of these will be entering unfamiliar territory on a new post after having left dear friends from their previous assignment. I am sure many of these new faces will be ones I will bid reluctant goodbyes to in the years to come as they and their families become a part of my life.

Saying goodbye has always been, to me, the hardest part of being a military spouse. I can deal for the most part with being a single parent for months on end, with the constant moving and changing of households.

I secretly enjoy the unpacking of all my worldly possessions in order to make a new house our home, and can acknowledge with almost no guilt whatsoever that there are going to be around 10 boxes that move with us to every base but which will never get opened because, no matter how many times my husband may assure me he will go through them, it will never happen.

I can deal with my editor being ready to shoot me when I write run-on sentences like the one above.

I can handle knowing my children will rarely attend the same school for longer than three years and I understand the fact that I have to quickly make new friends at each new post to which we relocate.

It's saying goodbye to the old ones that I have trouble with.

But, it's all part of the military spouse parcel, so I will do so, reluctantly and with a lot of laughter and some tears.

And, in a little over a year or so, I will probably be the one leaving everyone else behind.

Tiffany Horvath is the mother of two and the stepmother of one. Her husband, Drew, is deployed to Iraq. She writes every Sunday abut life at home for the wife of a deployed soldier.