A close-up of a bride placing a ring on her partner’s finger during a wedding ceremony.

Military Spouse Appreciation is More Than a Hashtag

Written By Lizann Lightfoot

May rolls around, and suddenly social media lights up with #MilitarySpouseAppreciationMonth posts and quick “thank you” posts.

It’s nice to see, but for many of us juggling solo parenting during deployments, hunting for jobs that fit around PCS moves and carrying the invisible load of keeping the household running, those shoutouts can feel surface-level.

After two decades as a Marine spouse, I’ve learned that real appreciation doesn’t come from social media posts. It starts inside, with recognizing our own strengths and taking small steps to celebrate them year-round.

Lizann and her husband smile together at their wedding.

Military spouses didn’t always sign up for this life the way our service members did. When we said, “I do,” few of us pictured the loneliness of moving every two or three years, never quite putting down roots and always being the new face in the spouse group. We didn’t anticipate career dreams getting paused and restarted so many times.

The reality for many spouses is that each new base means another entry-level job, another gap on the résumé and another hit to retirement savings — because there’s rarely time or stability to build a 401(k) of our own.

By the time our service members retire, many of us realize we’ve sacrificed decades of our own financial security.

Lizann smiles and flexes her arm in front of stacked moving boxes in a garage or storage space.

Lizann takes a mirror selfie while painting a wall with a roller, wearing a casual T-shirt.

Military spouses who become parents face many additional unexpected challenges, such as giving birth alone in a hospital while our spouse is on the other side of the world or raising toddlers far from grandparents and cousins.

We become solo parents far more often than we ever imagined: handling every bedtime, school conference and midnight fever solo while our spouse trained, deployed or stood duty.

We didn’t plan on restarting medical care for ourselves and our kids after every move, hunting for new doctors who accept TRICARE, explaining our child’s history all over again and waiting months for appointments.

Lizann holds her newborn baby against her chest, both resting in a hospital bed.

A sleeping newborn lies on an American flag blanket with a yellow ribbon tied around them.

The challenges are real and stubborn. The isolation of military life can be crushing — leading to depression, anxiety and even secondary post-traumatic stress disorder from years of constant uncertainty. These are deep, painful sacrifices that civilian friends and family rarely see. They are unseen burdens that are rarely acknowledged or discussed. No gift card or cute hashtag can fix them.

But here’s the empowering part: True appreciation begins within us, not from others. If you are feeling unseen or underappreciated, think for a moment about whether you ever acknowledge yourself. How have you celebrated your own accomplishments? When you look in the mirror, do you smile with confidence at the person you’ve become and the situations you have conquered?

Start by building a personal “wins” list. Jot down what you’ve accomplished lately, no matter how small. Maybe you kept the kids fed and happy through a long temporary duty, navigated a tough school enrollment after a move or just got out of bed on a hard day.

During one deployment stretch, my “brag wall” included things such as “Took five kids to the festival, no one got lost!” and “Caught the mouse in the kitchen.” Reading it back gave me a quiet boost.

Do this regularly. It’s a reminder that you’re not just surviving, you’re thriving in ways most people can’t imagine.

A woman holds a baby and a sign reading, “This guy wants to meet his Daddy!” with people in military uniforms in the background

Next, lean on the resources designed for us. There are hundreds of employers committed to hiring and retaining military spouses, and many offer flexible, remote or portable roles. Military OneSource’s Spouse Education and Career Opportunities program is a gold mine.

Through MySECO, you can connect with career coaches who have advanced degrees in counseling or education. They can help at any stage: clarifying goals, résumé tweaks for military life gaps, finding portable certifications or prepping for virtual hiring fairs. It’s free, confidential and available 24/7.

Lizann and her husband smile in front of American and Marine Corps flags, with her husband wearing a decorated military uniform.

Advocating for better support in your community is another powerful step. When we speak up together, change happens — more flexible policies, better awareness and real support.

Join or start conversations in local spouse groups, online pages or base family readiness programs. Share what’s working (or not) about child care, employment barriers or license portability. Push for events beyond the May spotlight, such as ongoing workshops or employer meetups.

Appreciation Month is a great reminder, but don’t limit it to May. Instead, make it a habit. Celebrate small victories, use the tools available and lift each other up. True strength comes from within, from knowing you’ve got this, even on the toughest days.

So this month (and every month), look in the mirror and say thank you to the strong, capable person staring back. You’ve earned it.

Blog Brigade unites military spouses by creating a community built on shared experiences and mutual support. Navigating the complexities of military life can be challenging, but you don’t have to do it alone. Military OneSource offers valuable resources focused on well-being, readiness and connection. Explore a range of mental health resources tailored to your needs.

A young child stands with arms outstretched facing a low-flying aircraft over an open desert landscape

Romanticizing Military Life

Written By Lauren Hagee Glintz

Sometime after our PCS this summer, I realized with increasing unease that I occasionally sensed booms in our new North Carolina house. I’d be rocking the baby, and I’d almost hear but definitely feel a deep, vibrating boom, usually several in a row. They weren’t loud enough to wake the baby, just enough to make me look around confused, and then they’d stop.

One day, it started booming while my husband was home. “Do you hear that? Is that something military?” I asked him. We are surrounded by military bases here — within an hour of MCAS Cherry Point, Camp LeJeune and MCAS New River — and I assumed my Marine husband would know about any military things.

He did not know about the booms. In fact, he shared my unease. We looked at each other, wondering if our new house was threatening to explode. My husband even went into the attic to look around. When he didn’t find anything, I texted some of my new neighborhood friends about the booms to see if they were experiencing them as well.

One friend immediately responded, “Oh, that’s the heavy artillery training,” and sent a link to noise advisories from Camp LeJeune.

Reassured that the booms are, in fact, not our house threatening impending disaster, I actually find them amusing. “Oh yes,” I imagine nonchalantly telling my friends and family, “Sometimes it booms at my house,” as if it’s the most charming thing in the world. And that’s because I am a big believer in romanticizing my life.

Romanticizing life is fairly buzzy on social media right now, and honestly, I’m all for it. I love the idea of taking the normal (and not-so-normal) of your everyday life and reframing it as something special. I also like that it’s not about ignoring what’s hard or pretending things are easy, rather noticing what’s already good or interesting in your life, no matter how small, and leaning into it.

It’s not rushing through your morning coffee, or in my case, your morning diet soda, but reveling in the beautiful ritual of popping open the sparkly silver can and pouring it into a glass filled to the brim with ice. It’s hearing artillery fire and finding whimsy.

Despite being a social media trend, I think romanticizing your life is important, particularly when it comes to military life. So many things about being a military spouse are tough. It’s easy to slip so far into survival mode that one day you wake up and realize you’re sort of miserable.

When you romanticize your life, though, you remind yourself you’re the star of your own movie, not just the supporting character to your spouse’s military career. Suddenly, cooking dinner isn’t just cooking dinner: It’s the fun kitchen montage of the leading lady and deserves a soundtrack of your favorite music. With this perspective shift, it’s easier to feel excited about your day-to-day life, even when things are otherwise hard.

A toddler stands in a grassy yard reaching toward oranges on a tree, with a colorful beach ball beside them near a house

Take, for example, PCSing. As military spouses, we do not get to choose our home. While it’s very easy for me to romanticize coastal North Carolina, I cannot say the same about our last duty station, Yuma, Arizona, a remote desert town at the edge of the United States.

When I got off the plane in Yuma for the very first time, my two-month-old in my arms, it was 118 degrees. There is no romanticizing 118 degrees. But! There is romanticizing the fact that Yuma is the sunniest city on earth (this is a true, searchable fact!). And the inherited orange tree in my backyard that was so heavy with fruit in the winter that I taught myself to make marmalade.

And the helicopters and planes that flew low over town, much to the delight of my toddler. And the quirky shops! And the tamale festival! And! And! And! Eventually, I grew to love Yuma, despite the 118-degree days, and we built a beautiful — dare I say romantic? — life there.

Blog Brigade unites military spouses by creating a community built on shared experiences and mutual support. Navigating the complexities of military life can be challenging, but you don’t have to do it alone. Military OneSource offers valuable resources focused on well-being, readiness, and connection. Explore a range of moving resources and tools tailored to your needs.

A hand holds a coffee mug showing a cartoon dog surrounded by flames with a speech bubble that reads, “This is fine,” in a kitchen setting.

Military Life Fueled My Anxiety, Then Taught Me to Manage It

Written By Kristi Stolzenberg

I’ve wrestled with anxiety my entire life. But growing up in the 80s and 90s, we didn’t label it “anxiety.” We didn’t really label it anything, and as a result, I thought everyone wrestled with the symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or GAD.

The night before I started kindergarten, as my mom tells the story, I was “nervous” and didn’t want to go because I wasn’t going to know everything.

So, yeah, I might not be able to credit the military for giving me GAD, but it was known to fan the flames on more than a couple occasions.

Nine Digits

As a newlywed, on my second-ever visit to a military treatment facility, I was given some less-than-ideal test results and was sent to the lab (wherever that was) for bloodwork. When I finally arrived at the lab after an embarrassing number of wrong turns, all the worst-case scenarios running through my head, the lady at the desk asked me (everybody now), “What’s your sponsor’s social?”

I stupidly told her I had no clue what my husband’s Social Security number was.

She yelled at me. I cried, for a lot of reasons, but being on the receiving end of a scolding in public was in my/the top five.

Later that day, I learned what an Interactive Customer Evaluation comment was. And today, while I can quickly recall his social, when I’m asked for my own, it takes me a minute to dig it out of the recesses of my brain. The longer it takes to recall it, the more anxious I get, which only makes it harder to focus and easier to start nervous sweating.

A couch ripped apart with Kristi’s daughter shrugging.

Are We Having “Mandatory Fun” Yet?

The years kept rolling, and my anxiety was thriving in this environment of forced socializing with strangers, unknowns at every turn, pressure to get involved (mostly self-imposed), anticipation (of deployments, homecomings, orders, PCSes), and waves of unemployment, solo parenting, homesickness, postpartum depression and grief.

Over time, my “specialty” when it came to anxiety became social and anticipatory anxieties. And, just to keep things spicy, parenthood unlocked a whole new level of stressors, and each year, the list of “Things I Should Probably Know By Now” grew, which only added new opportunities (in my mind) to embarrass myself or not fit in.

Naming It, Owning It, Doing Something About It

Keep in mind, up to this point, I hadn’t received a diagnosis. I hadn’t seen a mental health professional … ever. I thought everyone faced the same symptoms. I just needed to toughen up, push them down, so I could face challenges (however small) as calmly as anyone else. Pro tip: That doesn’t work.

Leaving an OCONUS base after a particularly difficult and emotional tour while the raging pandemic threatened to foil our PCS more than once, I was reaching “cry uncle” levels of (what I now know is) anxiety. I didn’t know what to do or what would happen if I answered yes to any of the mental health screening questions scripted into every primary care appointment.

What my stubborn, I-don’t-need-help self was beginning to understand, though, is that this might not be normal, what I was doing on my own wasn’t helping, and it was not fair to dump all my stress and fear onto family and friends.

So, at a virtual primary care appointment (thanks, COVID), I answered those screener questions truthfully for the first time, and I received a mental health referral.

That was it. It was that easy.

I began seeing a therapist. In our first session, I unpacked everything through sobs. She listened. She helped me put a name to my tangled knot of symptoms, and through our sessions, she taught me how to balance the good stress that motivates us to do anything and the bad (which keeps us up at night and makes us worry over things we can’t control).

It’s been almost six years since I was diagnosed, which means I’ve had almost six years to navigate military life (and retirement) knowing what I was working with and confident I could handle it.

As my husband planned his retirement and life post-Marine Corps, my hand was steady (and, more importantly, not sweating).

Armed with what I learned in therapy, I didn’t find myself chasing the what-ifs, stressing about the invitations or cake or losing sleep over changes in income. And while he found himself anxious about the future (understandable, given the transition), I was able to share what I learned with him, and now with you.

Ask yourself: What am I anxious about? Can I do anything about it right now?

The answer is almost always no, and when it is, I do something to ground myself — often through a breathing exercise — and I redirect my energy.

This quieted nearly every stressor in military life because so much is out of our control as spouses, and to its credit, the Marine Corps was very generous with opportunities to practice coping strategies.

Now, even as we’ve put military life in the rearview, I hold onto this perspective — at work, at home, while watching the news and when I’m stuck in traffic.

No, the military didn’t give me anxiety, but it ultimately helped me identify it. It gave me good friends who don’t shy away from discussing mental health honestly and openly and it let me leave feeling empowered to handle challenges ahead. It might not have been the smoothest ride, and I took the long way, but the view from here is spectacular!

Blog Brigade unites military spouses by creating a community built on shared experiences and mutual support. Navigating the complexities of military life can be challenging, but you don’t have to do it alone. Military OneSource offers valuable resources focused on well-being, readiness, and connection. Explore a range of mental health resources tailored to your needs.

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