I’ve got to be completely honest with you guys.
I don’t really know what this post is going to turn into.
Not. A. Clue.
It’s been over 2 years since I last wrote a blog post.
Something I never would have thought I’d let happen, back when I was posting almost every day and probably annoying every single person who ever read my posts.
And yet here we are, two years and one week after my last post in which I detailed some thoughts about the Pandemic as well as a detailed account of the birth of my fourth child.
And SURPRISE! I now have five children.
And actually that won’t be a surprise for anybody that will read this post. It’s not like I’ve kept it a secret on social media.
But a lot has happened in the past two years.
We are still living in the same house we were two years ago, but we’ve got that sweet little additional family member… Aaaaand my husband is gone.
Not for good, thankfully, but for a while. Possibly a year. Who knows?
Here’s the thing: It’s been a crazy 9-10 months. 10 Months ago I had a baby, which always kind of messes with things (but in the best possible way). And 9 months ago my husband got some weird orders that made absolutely zero sense.
As in: We were suppose to be moving back to Good Ol’ Missouri this summer for his Captain’s Career Course. We’d been banking on it for a while. He hadn’t gotten orders yet, but we knew they were coming. So when he saw he had some new orders we assume they were those.
But they weren’t.
I’m really not going to go into all the crazy details about what all went down and all the major sucktastic things that happened that got us to where we are now.
The short story: my husband is somewhere else and we’d like to live there with him. But the Army has very fantastically dumb rules about some things and some other people royally screwed us over and so he had to go ahead with the hopes we could get approval to meet him there later.
So on January 30th, I drove my husband to the airport at 3am and said “See ya! Not sure when, but I’ll see ya!” (I mean, I’m sure it was more in the form of ugly-crying about how much I would miss him, but you get the gist.)
And here we are. 2 1/2ish months later and we still don’t know if we will get to join him.
And if I’m being completely real, it’s been hard. Like really, REALLY hard.
We are pretty new to this military lifestyle. But even in the relatively short time my husband has been in, we’ve learned a lot about being flexible and just sort of “winging it” when it comes to plans. And sometimes that’s okay. It used to really bother me that I couldn’t just look 5 years into my future and have at LEAST a kind of accurate view of what my life was going to look like.
(And realistically, can anyone really do that? Life just doesn’t turn out the way you think it will.)
But I’ve gotten over that for the most part. I learn to love wherever we are living at any given time, and I look forward to the other adventures that we have ahead. Usually I have a pretty optimistic attitude about this whole military adventure.
This past month has been rough though.
I haven’t been able to get out of my own freaking head. It’s also worth pointing out that I have my 5 kids home ALL THE TIME because genius me decided that homeschooling my kids while my husband is gone would be a great idea…
And truth be told I’ve enjoyed my time homeschooling. I’m also going to enjoy having only 2 kids at home come the fall when my older kids all go back to public school. Ha!
My kids think I’m on the verge of an emotional/mental breakdown. And they probably aren’t wrong. After all, I’ve yelled at them more times than I can count in the past week alone and ugly cried and complained and asked God countless times, “You’re gonna take care of this all… right!?”
And with the minor struggles I’ve had with my mental health in the past, I’m usually pretty aware about my mental state. But I think, honestly, the past few weeks I’ve been becoming a little too complacent.
I’ve spent far too much time on Instagram and not enough time reading my scriptures.
I’ve spent too many hours playing a game on my phone and not enough time bonding with my children.
I’ve stayed up way too late binging Netflix shows and not nearly enough time sleeping and catering to my body’s needs.
And then I wonder why I’m having such a hard time.
Shocking, I know.
And I could sit here and feel all sorts of guilt about those things. And heck, sometimes I DO feel guilty about them. But really, the guilt isn’t going to do me (or my kids) any good. And so I’m turning over a new leaf. This week I started exercising again. And it’s been amazing.
And today I sat down and wrote out my first blog post on here in over two years. And even despite all the typos that I’m certain you’ll find, and despite the fact that maybe only two people will ever read this post, and despite the fact that it’s all just rambling and I’m not really saying anything… I’m glad I did it.
Because writing has always been therapeutic to me. I like to write. Actually, I LOVE to write. I always have. And for years, I was always writing something. Whether it was a short story, or a paper for college, or a blog post… I always had SOMETHING in the works.
And then a year ago I graduated college. And the writing stopped. My learning kind of stopped. Suddenly I wasn’t writing papers all the time. And maybe I’m just a weirdo, but there’s something very therapeutic about writing in general, even when it’s a research paper.
And I’ve missed it. Not enough that I’m willing to go back to school just yet, but I have really really missed it. And I didn’t even realize it.
So whether or not you made it to the end of my rambling or whether or not you can stand my style of writing, you’ll likely be seeing more from me.
It won’t be anything exciting. It won’t be “Mommy Blogger” or “Content Creator” worthy. And that’s okay. It’ll be fully 100% me and it will help get me back on track to where I want to be.
’til next time (which will be sooner than two years from now)…
Ash
