Still Standing

Every family has its strengths and struggles. Having a spouse or parent who has to travel brings its challenges as well as benefits.  Same statement applies to those families who are a part of the military. There are families around the world that have a family member living away from the home in order to provide.

            However, the extra stress that comes from knowing a loved one is overseas and in constant danger weighs heavy.  After they come back, new challenges present.   If your soldier comes back severely injured, well… the realization that you have to adjust to a new normal is a whole different ball game. 

            Our family has been through the ringer.  But we are still standing.  We are prospering, actually.  It is still very easy to look at other families and think they are normal, while we have the “burden” of living in the new normal. It’s frustrating, relentless, and rewarding all in the same. 

The reason I chose to write about this is because earlier this week I had to work out of the house for a day. When I passed the house to pick my baby up from the neighbor, my husband’s truck was still in the driveway. He was supposed to be at work.  My heart dropped, and I panicked, “Is everything okay? Is he okay? I need to go check on him -but my daughter was with me.” I was praying that he just overslept his alarm because I was not there to make sure he was awake.  It was like a flashback to 10 years ago when he was first injured. So, I picked up the baby and left my daughter at the neighbor’s house. I went to check on him. Phew, he had just overslept.  Then I was almost embarrassed.  I had to take a step back and realize that I didn’t care what the situation looked like because we have come so far in the last 10 years to be where we are today. My husband wakes up every day in pain and continues to tread forward with such grace. 

            Anyways, I had to take a step back and realize that it’s easy to judge from the outside.  Nobody knows what we’ve had to go through to get to where we are.  The daily struggles one faces just to get through the day may be enough to drop some to their knees. Sometimes it can be easy to feel like someone is judging our situation, but they have no idea how hard we have worked just to get to where we are. Still standing.