Deployment has taken on so many meanings for me over the years. As I ponder this now, I think of it as… a noun …a verb… an adjective… a way of life… separation… loneliness… training… bonding… selfless acts… a mission… courage…. AND… a journey.

My journey began when I married my “man in uniform”. Back then, he was in the Navy, I was volunteering, and we started a family.

Life as a young Navy wife was challenging, and at times I had felt like a victim of the deployment cycle. I felt like I was on a spin cycle that wasn’t slowing down and someone else was in control of our destiny.

After ten years in the Navy, we had an idea to give the Army National Guard a try. He wanted to be involved in his community and offer a normal life for our children. We found that the life of the citizen soldier became our new way of life.

However, life has a funny way of changing on you, especially when I learned that my husband volunteered for deployment to Iraq. It was then, that the concept of deployment, took on a new meaning for me.

Deployment, this time around, was different…he volunteered and he was going to be gone for eighteen months. In Navy talk, that’s the life cycle of three, six-month deployments-back to back. Or in mommy talk, that’s two pregnancy terms in a row. I didn’t know what to think or even how to begin to prepare myself, my spouse, our kids, their school teachers, the small community in which we lived or our FRG group.

Something clicked for me, I was more prepared then I ever thought for this journey with my citizen soldier and our children. This time, I didn’t feel alone. I was a part of a Family Readiness Group Team. There was support from members of our community, community organizations and the FRG in addition to family and friends and I decided I was not going to be a victim. I was going to choose the path my journey would follow through this deployment.

Over the years, military family programs have grown drastically. There are many wonderful organizations and a great number of people who have helped pave the way the military takes care of their families. Thanks to their dedication to military families, we now have an abundance of Family programs, military educational programs, and a system of resources to help prepare the military families for military life as well as their deployment journeys.

In the Navy we dealt with deployments that were “on the water”. This time, with the Army National Guard, the eighteen-month deployment took him “over the water”, with his “boots on ground”. I knew his volunteering for deployment was what he needed to do and it was the right thing. We would both complete this deployment journey on our own paths but at the end our paths would be joined again as one. I also knew it wouldn’t be long before he had his “boots on ground” again, but this time it would be at home.