Blog mortality?

The end is near my friends... Swiss and I are job hunting and looking at places to live and sort of getting on with the process of no longer being beholden to the Army. This military life of ours has an expiration date and it isn't all that far away... it makes me wonder what will happen to this wee blog of mine. Will I keep it? Will anyone still read it once it becomes the ramblings of a non-military life? Will I still have a voice I want to share once I'm not a part of the great wide Military family? Or will I always be a part of that family? Do I really want to be just a normal blogger? *sigh* There's something powerful and special about being a MilSpouse blogger... there's a special niche and wonderful people who populate it. You feel like you are a part of something unique. And like you have a voice worthy of being heard...

But I can't help but wonder, is it once a MilSpouse, always a MilSpouse? Or do you get kicked out of the club when the retirement papers are served? I just don't know...

I do have blogger friends who have left the military and keep on blogging... but I universally think these women are 182 times cooler than me and have lives that totally warrant sharing them with the world (I am looking at you Amy!). Me? I don't know. I don't know what life holds for us, I don't know if it will be worth sharing, I don't know if it will be interesting or funny or if anyone will care. I don't know if I will even want to. Mostly, it is the idea of losing what this blog has given me makes me all melancholy.

I started this blog about six months before Swiss left for the Sandbox. At the time I was an Army newbie, still desperately trying to find my way. I was a fiancee then, trying to plan a wedding and cope with a PCS and looming deployment and utterly terrified that my perfect life would never come to fruition because of a war on the other side of the world, a war I didn't agree with. I was scared and naieve and unsure of myself in this new role. And I didn't know who to turn to. So I started blogging, mostly as an outlet for my fears and concerns and questions. Not because I thought anyone would read.

But somewhere along the line it turned into something I never anticipated- a lifeline to support, understanding, cameraderie, and lasting friendships. I found people who just got it, plain and simple. I found compassion and kindness, humor and bouyancy, wit, intellengence, charm, strength. I found an open seat in a lifeboat, full of women who had been where I was, or were currently there with me. I found what would eventually be what get me through this deployment. I found you all. And you know what else? I found my voice. I found on outlet for the things I wanted to say, and in you all I had an audience- a fabulous audience.

There are too many of you to list, but you absolutely know who you are. I love you and cherish you and am beyond grateful to you. Because were it not for you, I cannot fathom how I would have made it through this. I shudder to think what would have become of me if left to my own devices... not to be melodramatic, but you all kept me sane. Swiss and I both thank you!

This blog gave me a voice that I wasn't always comfortable sharing in person. Don't ask why, because I don't have an answer. But sometimes saying these things aloud was too hard, too uncomfortable, to difficult to explain. Being able to write it all down let me tell the most important people in my life (Beth, Val, Em, Shari, Mom...) what was going on in my head and process it in their own time... it let them know that even though I seemed okay, I wasn't always okay. But this blog let me explain myself. It let them into my head without having to find the right words immediately or ask questions they weren't sure they could. For that I am grateful. For these friends I am grateful.

So it is with trepidation that I (we) saunter up to the place in our life where we are no longer inextricably linked to the Armed Forces. Deployments will be a thing of the past. There will be no FRG drama, no phone trees, no MPs at the gate, no tales of bad phone lines or care packages gone wrong. There won't be tales from the front, anticipatory grief, unconsolable fear. I certainly won't miss any of those things, but I will miss belonging to the one thing that links us all together. I will miss being a part of this community. I will miss being counted amongst you--- you all are a group I have been so very proud to be a part of.

I wonder, if when we are just 'normal' civilians again, if you all will read. Will you read because we've formed a bond, a friendship? Or will you stop, eventually, inevetably, because our life will no longer bear any resemblance to yours? I don't know the answer to this. I wish I did. I just know that I don't want to fade away and not be, at least on the fringes, a part of this amazing community I was so fortunate to tap into. I still want to be one of you all, even when I'm not.