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Having lived in the same house with my parents for all my childhood (and some of my adult) years was a solid foundation for me. It gave me that one thing in my life that I could always count on. Home would always be right there at Dukharan Avenue and if all else failed, I could pack up my meagre belongings and head home for Mom and Dad to help me get back on my feet.

In fact, that is exactly what happened on at least 2 occasions. When my first marriage failed, at first I shared an apartment with a friend for a year. Then we just couldn’t afford the monthly rental anymore and she found something smaller and I went home.

The next time it happened was after another relationship failed and I had no where to go. Again, home with Mom and Dad was a haven that I was able to depend on to recuperate and rebuild my life one small step at a time.

Marrying my soldier husband and moving over 3000 miles to be with him, has changed that fact. Mom and Dad and Dukharan Avenue are too far away now, for them to be a haven. So how did I go from depending on that haven to being a military spouse with so much uncertainty and impermanence? I had to re-adjust how I thought of home. Instead of home being a familiar and known PLACE, I aligned my thinking with the concept of home being a PERSON.

I tried thinking of home as where my husband laid his head to sleep. For many reasons, that concept was a bad one. Firstly, the independent being in me revolted at that thought since my husband is an entity external to me and depending on him to be in a particular place seemed to me to be somewhat feeble and needy. Secondly, that concept was severely challenged once we received orders and were assigned to Texas and had to drive halfway across the country from Kentucky.

On arrival here in Texas, it became increasingly real to me that he would be deployed and that my concept of home would be gone for a year and leave me living in a house that was not home. That in itself was enough to cause a high level of anxiety. I had to re-think the concept.

Now I spend my time trying to re-align the concept to home being wherever *I* happen to lay my head down to sleep for an extended period of time. Home constitutes having all my personal creature comforts with me: my kindle, my iPhone, my iMac, my Macbook, my kettle, my mug that proclaims “Army Wife – toughest job in the army”.

My strategy, then, is to think of home as the place where I can be comfortable and occupied and content until the next move.

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