Any Military wife is all too familiar with the saying, “Home is where the military sends you.”  Like it or not.

If you want to survive as a Military wife, you have to embrace this mindset.    Otherwise, you spend your time being miserable rather than enjoying the interesting things and people that you encounter in whatever corner of the world you get sent. And that is certainly not how anyone wants to live life.   One thing I will honestly tell you is this:  just because we have a catchy little saying that happens to be very true, doesn’t mean it is easy to move.

We recently received orders to Virginia.  That’s military talk for the next job assignment, which involves yards of paperwork and packing paper, as well as a geographical move.  Oh yes, PCS season is rapidly approaching, and my time left on Okinawa begins to accelerate much like a snowball rolling down a mountainside.

Again, for those of you unfamiliar with military acronyms (which make up 92% of all words used by active duty military personnel—just so you know), PCS stands for Permanent Change of Station.  It’s actually a pretty benign sounding title.  In reality, a PCS involves a tremendous amount of work (both the physical and the paper kind), lots of research, major decisions, many large purchases, and a good deal of emotional adjustments.

So don’t be fooled, when you hear the letters PCS, just know that a family’s life is getting ready to be packed up in boxes, shuffled and squeezed, and dumped out somewhere on the other end.  Oh the joys of receiving your household good shipment to your new address with 15,000 pounds of your life,waiting to be unpacked and put away. (And yes, there is always the relieved joy of having things arrive safe and sound.)

This morning I had the pleasure of attending a Smooth Move Brief, where I sat there and thought… “We are really going to leave my corner of the world.” My state of denial could be nursed no longer.   After receiving tons of information about everything move, the mad dash to schedule travel plans, packers, lodging begins.

Nowhere in the brief did they address the issue of, “I don’t want to move…again.” There were no classes called, “But Moving Makes Me Crazy.”

There was a distinct lack of any handouts entitled…”Saying Goodbye to Friends You Love.”

Nothing on the transition from international to suburb and the adjustment that is going to come with driving 75 mph when you have spent four years with a max speed of 40.

That is not what these briefs are for. These briefs are all about housing checkouts, travel allotments, transferring medical regions, household good shipments…

The paperwork is the easy part…it is the heart-side of moving that is much harder.

Come back tomorrow for some more rumination on the joys of moving as we get into the issue of the Ornery Moving Hormone!